May 1940, The Battle For The Netherlands

May 1940
History of Warfare
Editors
Kelly DeVries
Loyola College in Maryland
John France
University of Wales Swansea
Michael S. Neiberg
University of Southern Mississippi
Frederick Schneid
High Point University
VOLUME 57
May 1940
The Battle for the Netherlands
Edited by
Herman Amersfoort and Piet Kamphuis
LEIDEN • BOSTON
2010
On the cover: Dutch infantry position behind the Valley Canal (photo: Spaarnestad
Fotoarchief, Haarlem).
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by print, photo print, microfilm or any
other means, without written permission from the publisher. The views expressed in this
publication are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Netherlands
Minister of Defence.
This book is printed on acid-free paper.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data
May 1940 : the battle for the Netherlands / edited by Piet Kamphuis and Herman Amersfoort.
p. cm. -- (History of warfare, ISSN 1385-7827 ; v. 57)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-90-04-18438-1 (hbk. : alk. paper) 1. World War, 1939-1945--Campaigns--
Netherlands. I. Kamphuis, P. H. II. Amersfoort, H. (Hermanus), 1951- III. Title. IV. Series.
D763.N4M39 2010
940.54’2192--dc22 2010001509
ISSN: 1385-7827
ISBN: 978-90-04-18438-1
Copyright 2010 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands.

Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints BRILL, Hotei Publishing, IDC Publishers,
Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, and VSP.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in
a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical,
photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher.
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Fees are subject to change.
Typeset by chs:p [Leiden, Netherlands]
printed in the netherlands

CONTENTS
Preface ............................................................................................................ ix
Colour maps
I. Introduction . ........................................................................................ 1
H. Amersfoort
The Netherlands and the war
The shock
The questions
II. The Emergence of the German Threat ............................................ 13

H.W. van den Doel
The consequences of the First World War
Versailles
The 1920s: seeking stability
Fascism and National Socialism
National Socialists in power
The German Lebensraum ambitions
Conclusion
III. Between Hope and Fear: The Netherlands armed forces

in the interwar period ....................................................................... 35
C.M. Schulten and P.M.J. de Koster
Introduction
The legacy of neutrality
After the First World War
The cupboard is bare - from 1922 to 1933
Turning point
Rising tensions
The military geography of the Netherlands
Strategic policy
Winkelman’s operation plan
vi contents
IV. The Gathering Storm: The German armed forces

in the interwar period ....................................................................... 89
J.W.M. Schulten
Introduction
The German rearmament
Baptism of fire
The German operation plan for the Westfeldzug
Plan of attack of the 18th Army
The alert
V. The Generals’ Duel: Five days of war at the military

strategic level . ................................................................................... 139
H. Amersfoort and J.W.M. Schulten
Düsseldorf, Friday 10 May 1940
The Hague, Friday 10 May 1940
Düsseldorf, Saturday 11 May 1940
The Hague, Saturday 11 May 1940
Düsseldorf, Sunday 12 May 1940
The Hague, Sunday 12 May 1940
Düsseldorf, Monday 13 May 1940
The Hague, Monday 13 May 1940
Düsseldorf, Tuesday 14 May 1940
The Hague, Tuesday 14 May 1940
Rijsoord, Wednesday 15 May 1940
VI. ‘Fall Festung’: A surprise attack on The Hague . ........................... 179

C.M. Schulten
Introduction
Ypenburg, Valkenburg and Ockenburg captured by the Germans
The continuing battle for the airfields on 10 May
The recapture of Ypenburg
The battle for Valkenburg
Ockenburg back in Dutch hands
Further actions against the airborne troops and the battle at Overschie
Conclusion
VII. Disputed Territory: The battle in the Dutch provinces of

Limburg, Noord-Brabant and Zeeland ......................................... 205
H.W. van den Doel
Introduction
contents vii
Operations against the bridges over the river Maas

The battle at Mill
Passage through Noord-Brabant
Zeeland struggles on
The final pocket of resistance eradicated
Conclusion
VIII. The Field Army Defeated: The battle for the Grebbe Line . ........ 261
H.W. van den Doel
Introduction
The fall of the IJssel Line
The attack on the outposts of the IVth Division
General Harberts’ countermeasures
The German attack on the main resistance sector
Chaos among the military leadership
The fall of the Grebbe Line
The battle at Scherpenzeel
The end
Conclusion
IX. “Vorwärts denken, vorwärts sehen, vorwärts reiten!”:

The battle in the northern provinces ............................................. 321
P.H. Kamphuis
The territorial defence of the northern Netherlands
A morning of battle and a pursuit in vain
The collapse of the Wons Position
The offensive reconnaissance mission fails
Conclusion
X. Not a bridge too far: The battle for the Moerdijk bridges,
Dordrecht and Rotterdam . ............................................................. 343
H.W. van den Doel
The German plans
Dutch combat readiness
The German airborne landings
Consolidation of the German positions
Actions by the border battalions and the Kil Group
The Light Division takes action
Die Panzer arrive on time
The battle in Rotterdam
viii contents
The bombing of Rotterdam

Conclusion
XI. Myth and reality ............................................................................... 395

H. Amersfoort
Still coming to terms with the past?
Analysing the military operations
Pre-war defence policy: does it require re-evaluation?
Annex: Table of land forces rank equivalents . ....................................... 419
Annotated bibliography ............................................................................ 421

Index ............................................................................................................ 449
Biographical notes . .................................................................................... 461

Photo acknowledgements ......................................................................... 463
PREFACE
The original, Dutch-language edition of this book was published in 1990,

fifty years after the Netherlands became involved in the Second World
War. It was the work of a young generation of university-educated mili-
tary historians who, unlike their predecessors, had no personal memories
of the war. Their aim was to subject the five-day war of May 1940 to a
critical analysis and thus provide an explanation for the crushing defeat
which the Dutch armed forces suffered at the hands of the German Wehr-
macht. The sometimes sobering conclusions led to fierce negative reac-
tions among part of the readership, in particular in veterans’ circles. Oth-
ers appreciated the book as a successful attempt to separate the subject
matter from the feelings of anger and shame which had dominated previ-
ous historiography.
The book achieved good print numbers, was soon sold out and in the
following years continued to receive a great deal of attention on the sec-
ond-hand market, so that in 2005 a revised edition was published, incor-
porating the most recent academic research in the Netherlands, France
and Germany.
At present, Mei 1940 is considered to be the authoritative work in the
Dutch language on the war between Germany and the Netherlands in
May 1940. This spawned the idea for an English-language edition, the re-
sult of which you now have before you. This edition again incorporates
the latest international academic research on the subject. The text has also
been adapted for an international readership.
This edition would not have been possible without the contributions of
many people. The editors would like to thank their colleagues at the Neth-
erlands Institute of Military History, and in particular the cartographer
and graphic designer, Louis Kaulartz. They also owe a debt of gratitude to
Heleen Heckman, head of the Netherlands Ministry of Defence Transla-
tion Service, to the translator, Fiona Nauta, and to Stephanie Lewis and
Kate Walsarie Wolff who worked on the translation under her responsi-
bility. Fiona Nauta in particular spared no effort, and it was a privilege to
work with her. We would like to thank Sdu Uitgevers in The Hague, who
x preface
published the Dutch edition, for their prompt permission to publish the
English translation. Last but not least, we thank Julian Deahl and his team
at Brill Publishers for the pleasant cooperation during the production of
this book.
Herman Amersfoort
Piet Kamphuis
COLOUR MAPS
illustrations 1
Key to symbols Key to maps and

diagrams Army
chain of command
Dutch unit air-transportable unit XXXXX
Army group
Belgian unit air force unit XXXX
Army
French unit MR motorcyclist unit XXX
Corps
German unit navy unit

XX
Division
infantry unit SSS marines unit
X
Brigade
tank unit transport unit
III
Regiment
artillery unit mortar unit
II
engineer unit machine-gun unit Battalion
I
signals unit mounted unit Company
Squadron, Battery
reconnaissance unit / motorised unit

light unit
Section
antitank unit armoured train
anti-aircraft unit cyclist unit
supply unit Gr grenadiers unit
staff unit DivTr division troops
medical unit PERS personnel
paratroop unit torpedomen unit

2 illustrations
Initial positions 10 May 1940
position and/or line 0 25 km
A Casemate line IJssel,
Arnhem-Nijmegen, (forward) position and/or line
Maas-Waal Canal, sector boundary German army
Maas and Juliana Canal sector boundary German corps
division front line
B Grebbe Line, Valley Position
BORKUM
Norden
C Peel-Raam Position N O R T H S E A SCHIERMONNIKOOG
ROTTUMEROOG
AMELAND
D Waal-Linge Position TERSCHELLING
Em
E New Dutch Waterline Delfzijl
s
A
F Southern front of Fortress Holland VLIELAND SE Groningen
N Leeuwarden Win
G Defence Line of Amsterdam E s choter- die p
D Harlingen
D Drachten
WA
H Casemate line in eastern Gronin- TEXEL J H
gen and eastern Drenthe Sneek
I Assen
Stadskanaal
I IJsselmeer Dam Heerenveen
v.
Den Helder
ofd
Ems
Ho
J Wons Position N E T H E R L A NO D S
ran
Staveren Lemmer je C
he
K Den Helder Position K an.
tsc
Petten Medemblik Emmen
en
L Eendracht, Zanddijk and Steenwijk Meppen
Dr
Enkhuizen
Bath Positions Hoorn Urk Meppel Hoogeveen
Alkmaar
M Oranje Position (planned) XX
IJSSELMEER Hardenberg
N Albert Canal Zwolle 1
Purmerend Kampen Ommen
Zaandam
O Dyle Line G Nordhorn
Marken A
Haarlem Amsterdam Harderwijk Almelo
Hengelo
B Bentheim
IJss
XXX
Deventer
el
XXX Apeldoorn Enschede

Leiden 4
1 A
The Hague Utrecht Amersfoort Zutphen
XXX Ahaus
Delft Arnhem XXX
Schoonhoven E 2 Wageningen
Winterswijk
Schiedam Rhenen Lower Rhine 10
ek D XXXX
Rotterdam L Zevenaar
Dordrecht Waal
Tiel Borken 18
Aa
Ma Nijmegen
Zaltbommel as
F Oss XXX
Bergse Maas Wezel
Zierikzee 's-Hertogenbosch 26
Moerdijk Xanten
XXX Mill Gennep
M
Steenbergen 3 A G E R M A N Y
Middelburg Breda Venray
L Bergen op Zoom Tilburg Geldern
XX Essen
Rhin
Flushing Kapelle XXX hr

Ru
C
e
Eindhoven Horst 9 Duisburg

ZEEUWS- Venlo Krefeld Wuppertal
Sc
Knokke VLAANDEREN Brasschaat

held
Turnhout Budel Düsseldorf

Cana
t
ch- l Solingen
pens XXX
Bruges Kem Weert Roermond XXXX
St.-Niklaas Antwerp Mol 11
Alb 6
Gr. Nete ert Maaseik Dalheim
Ghent O Heist N -
Leverkusen
Ca A
B E L G I U na
l M XXX
Cartography: Louis Kaulartz / NIMH
Aalst
Genk Geleen Cologne
Leuven Hasselt 4
er Gulpen
nd
Kortrijk De Brussels Tienen Maastricht XXX
Aachen
Vaals 27 Bad Godesberg
Edingen Waterloo Visé
Waver
Doornik
Ath Liège
XXXX
Dend
re Nijvel
use
Seneffe Gembloux Me Monschau
4
Huy
E
Jumet Spa
sc
au
t
rpe
Sca Mons Namur Adenau
Denain re Charleroi
Quevy mb Hillesheim
Sa
illustrations 3
Airfields around The Hague and the advance of Gruppe Sponeck
Valkenburg Airfield 10 May 1940 Katwijk aan Zee
0 1 2 km Warmond
dunes Katwijk a.d. Rijn Rijnsburg
2 3-4 3-4
Katwijk a. d. Rijn North Sea
Can
al Rijnsburg Valkenburg Oegstgeest
ly 11/5
Su
pp Valkenburg Airfield
Rh
10/5
ine
11/5 10/5
10/5 Haagsche
De Pan
6 2-2 Wassenaarse Schouw
Slag Rijksdorp
Valkenburg
Maaldrift
Wassenaar Leiden
Bier Lap
1 3-4 Den Deijl
Valkenburg

Airfield Meij en Del
Kievit
Drinking water
3 3-4 Pier
pumping station Voorschoten
Scheveningen
Stompwijk
4
5
The Hague Leidschendam
1 2
Ypenburg Airfield 10 May 1940
3
Kijkduin
Voorburg Drievliet
10/5
Ockenburg Airfield
Rijswijk
Rijswijk (bridge under constr.)
Ockenburg Hoornbrug
10/5 Loosduinen 10/5
temporary
1 2
Bloemendaal
10/5
bridge 1 3
11/5 Johanna hoeve
Ter Heijde Ypenburg Airfield velodrome
ta
xi
Poeldijk
w
ay
trambridge Hoeve Ypenburg

12/5 Wateringen
er
Monster Kwintsheul Delft 3 3 (u
nd
ct
io
n)
tram depot tru
’s-Gravenzande con
s
Honselersdijk
Ypenburg
Den Hoorn
1 3 2 3
Naaldwijk ’t Woudt
Airfield
Lierhand Hoeve Loos
11/5
10/5 De Lier
Staalduinen
Westerlee Schipluiden
1 2
Burgersdijk Villa Bimini
Zwet
Maasdijk
N
Negenhuizen brug
ie
uw
Hillegersberg
13/5
e
Zouteveen
10/5 Wa Noord-Kethel Schiebroek
te rw
eg
12/5
Poortershaven Schans
Kethel
Ockenburg Airfield 10 May 1940 Gruppe Sponeck Overschie Rotterdam
S
Zestienhoven airfield Dutch position

ch
Kijkduin Meer en
ie
Bosch
Zegbroek Overschie (a) M-36 armoured vehicle,
polder Abtspolder (a) (b)(c) (b) machine gun, (c) heavy machine gun
Ockenburg 12/5 landings of the Fallschirmjägerregiment

Airfield
1 2
Gruppe Sponeck’s displacement route to Overschie
3 1-2 PERS Geest German position 1 Queen’s palace
22 47 2 Parliament
location of German units
Blijrust 47 Spangensche 3 Energy company
Loosduinen Polder 12/5 arrival date
4 Coastal battery
Ockenburg planned route to: 5 Radio transmitter
German advance through Noord-Brabant and northern Limburg
4 illustrations
Alblasserdam 0 5 10 km
Bleskensgraaf Heukelum
Meteren
10 May
Barendrecht morning ALBLASSER WAARD Spijk Ophemert
TIELER WAARD 11 May
Papendrecht Sliedrecht Giessendam GORINCHEM Waardenburg morning
Zwijndrecht Hardinxveld
OU
MAADE DORDRECHT Brakel
S
12 May Werkendam Zaltbommel
D
evening RWE E
Maasdam ME Rijswijk BOMMELER
Island
WAARD
's-Gravendeel of
Nieuwendijk
KIL
Dordrecht L A N D
Tweede Tol B I E S B O S C H Aalburg Kerkdriel
E
UW V A N A L T E N A
Strijen NI
E
Hank
Willemsdorp Dussen Genderen Hedel
HE Heusden Rosmalen
Strijensas DIEP AM BERGSC
ER MAAS
DSLage-Zwaluwe Geertruidenberg OUDE
AN MAASJ
E Elshout
LL Hoge-Zwaluwe Vlijmen
HO Moerdijk Waspik
Raamsdonksveer
Raamsdonk Drunen
Klundert Zevenbergschen- Hoek Made ’s-HERTOGENBOSCH
Wagenberg 's-Gravenmoer
Zevenbergen Terheijden Kaatsheuvel
L
NA Oosterhout
CA Helvoirt VUGHT 11 May
RK
TEL Hazeldonk MA
W IL
HEL Dongen evening
DIN M IN 11 May
Teteringen A
CA +
N. Loon op Zand morning 12 May Schijndel
evening
BREDA
Rijen
TILBURG
Boxtel
Oisterwijk
11 May
Etten morning Ginneken
St. Willebrord Ulvenhout

Heike Gilze Moergestel
Rijsbergen Goirle Best

Chaam
AA
11 May Oirschot W
Hilvarenbeek evening
Meerle 12 May
evening
BE A
Zundert XX Middelbeers
TR
SSVD
IX
Meer
Baarle-Nassau
CA
Poppel
N.
Baarle-Hertog Meerveldhoven
XX 18 X
Lage Mierde XXX
25 Hoogstraten 6 Veldhoven
12 May Hoogeloon
The breach at Mill 10 May 1940 evening
Hapert Waa
Bladel
Ravels
474 XX
Eersel
Reusel
Lagepeel 254
Westerhoven
12 May
Graspeel
454 TURNHOUT evening
1 6 Bruggen
Arendonk Hof
Langenboom Nieuwmill Lagenberkt

Vilheide Horst XX
Mill 18 Postel Luijkgestel
Gierle Retie
481
1 3 Kapelhof
Molenheide
XX Dessel
Kasterlee
256 Neerpelt
Lommel
12 May
evening
456
XX
Mol
2 MR
Katwijksche 1 Balen
Peel Geel Exsel
Kerkhoven
2 2
10-12 May 1940
illustrations 5
W
AA Gendt Millingen Elten
L
Horssen
Altforst Beumingen Lobith
Dreumel
LAND VA N M A A S Bergharen NIJMEGEN Tolkamer
RHIN
E N WA A L E Emmerik
St. Anna
1
Megen XX 0
Oijen 26 X
Lith Ravenstein Wijchen Kellen
Malden Kleef Grieth
Groesbeek Till
Oss
Grave XX
Schaijk Overasselt
Mook 254 Calcar
Geffen Heesch 11 May Gassel
XXX
morning Cuyk
26
Gennep Pfalzdorf
Nistelrode Oeffelt
XXX Mill XX
3 St. Hubert Beugen

9
Goch Üdem
Uden
Heeswijk (see inset)
Boxmeer
Dinther Afferden Kervenheim
11 May XX
evening 11 May St. Anthonis Weeze
morning Maas Line 256
Hees
Veghel Oploo
ZU
ID Erp
- Vierlingbeek
Kevelaer
W
Wetten
IL
Westerbeek
LE
MS
Overloon
VA
St. Oedenrode Gemert Well

A
RT
De Rips Wanssum
P E E L
Beek Venraij Blitterswijk
Lieshout Geldern
Bakel 18 Oorloo Walbeck
WILHELMINA CA
NAL Aarle XXXX
XX HELMOND 6 Scheide
Nunen Peel-Raam Position

Arcen
Deurne
Horst
EINDHOVEN Griendsveen
MAAS
CA
Straelen
NA
Mierlo
L
Grubbenvorst Schandelo
Geldrop Liessel
Hooggeldrop Asten Sevenum Velden Wankum
Someren Helenaveen XX
X
Aalst Heusden Herongen
alre
11 May Blerick 56
morning Neerkant
Maasbree VENLO
XXX
Someren Eind Beringen Tegelen 9

Leende
Valkenswaard Meijel Panningen
Steijl Hinsbeck
Roggelschedijk Baarlo
Helden Kaldenkirchen Lobberich
11 May Maarheeze
evening Belfeld XX
Soerendonk Spurk 30
Budschop Offenbeek
Budel Nederweert Bracht
Hulsen Roggel Reuver
Hushoven
Heijthuizen Born
WEERT Neer
Dorplein Buggenum Brüggen
Haelen St. Georg
St. Huibrechts- Swalmen
Lille 11 May Swartbroek Elmpt
morning Baexem Boukoel
Horn Waldniel
Beegden Nieder-Krüchten
Stramproij ROERMOND
Kaulille
Gebroek
Bocholt Neeritter Heel
Kleine-Brogel Wessem
Molenbeersel Linne
Thorn St. Odiliënberg Wegberg
6 illustrations
Walcheren, Noord-Beveland, Zuid-Beveland and Zeeuws-Vlaanderen

14-17 May 1940
Ouddorp HA

Kattendijke Stellendam RI Goudswaard Nieuw-Beijerland
0 5 10 km NG
VL
3 40 IE
Wemeldinge V ELI NG T
G R E
Canal
E Middelharnis
N Zuid-Beijerland
Yerseke
271 Dirksland
3 38 Brouwershaven Middelsluis
Beveland
Molen dijk
SCHOUWEN OVERFLAKKEE
Kapelle
Serooskerke Willemstad
Oude Tonge
Vlake Ooltgensplaat
Biezelinge dijk
Westenschouwen Bruinisse K
1 40 nd- Kaasgat DUIVELAND R AM
Za
Zuid-
Zierikzee ME AK
R ER
Kruinigen ROOMPOT LK
Oosterland VO
St. Philipsland Dinteloord
O
Hansweert Fijnaart
O
S
16 May
TE
Colijnsplaat Stampersgat
afternoon
R
-
NOORD- St. Annaland Steenbergen

Stavenisse Oudgastel
Domburg Kamperland BEVELAND Nw. Vossemeer
Serooskerke Veere Kats Kruisland
Kortgene St. Maartensdijk
1 38
THOLEN
Westkapelle 16 May Roosendaal
Oostkerke Wilhelminadorp 02.30 hrs.
WALCHEREN 17 May 16 May Poortvliet
12.00 hrs. 16 May 10.30 hrs.
Middelburg Arnemuiden evening Goes Wemeldinge
Tholen
15
Kloetinge Wouw
Zoutelande 16 May
Sloe Dam Yerseke S C H
Koudekerke Heinkenszand 16.00 hrs. Kapelle ELD
E
Nispen
15 May
17 May ZUID-
’s-Gravenpolder 08.00 hrs. Bergen op Zoom
XX 23.00 hrs. Oost Souburg Zanddijk position
Kruiningen 14 May Essen
68 BEVELAND Hansweert 20.00 hrs.
Flushing Krabbendijke Woensdrecht SSD
Hoedekenskerke 15 May 14 Huijbergen
W E Borssele 13.00 hrs.
STE Baarland Waarde Rilland
tank ditch Hoogerheide
Breskens R- Bath position

Groede SC
HE Bath Kalmthout
Hoofdplaat Ellewoutsdijk LD Ossendrecht
E
Nieuwvliet 2 38 Kloosterzande
XX
XX Zandvliet SSG
Schoondijke Z E E U W S -
68 Terneuzen
225
Biervliet 17 May
Oostburg Berendrecht
IJzendijke Boschkapelle Kapellen
2 40 Doel 17 May
14 Zaamslag Lilloo
St. Margriete Nieuwnamen Brasschaat
Aardenburg Philippine
Watervliet
XX Sluiskil Kieldrecht Ekeren
Axel 38 Hulst
60 ld Canal
Verrebroek
Le opo VLAANDEREN
Merksem
Bassevelde St. Jansteen De Klinge
St. Laureins
Sas van Gent St. Gilles-Waas
ANTWERP Deurne
Li
Kaprijke Koewacht
js
Maldegem Melsele
dra
Zelzate St. Pauwels

ina
Eeklo Ertvelde Haasdonk

Moerbeke
ge
Berchem
Can
Wachtebeke Hoboken
Knesselare Waarschoot Sinaai St. Niklaas
al
Basel
illustrations 7
Grebbe Line 10 May 1940
Huizen 0 2 4 km
Ermelo
Leuvenum
Bussum I J s s e l m e e r
Nulde
Blaricum
Spakenburg Speulde
Putten
Laren
V
18 Bunschoten
Hilversum Garderen
E
Baarn
Nijkerk
G
L
E
Voorthuizen
U
Soestdijk L
XX
D Stroe
’t Hart 7
W
E
Soest
XXX
R
7
E
4 7
S
U
Bilthoven XX Amersfoort
T 8 5 Barneveld
E
XX
Harskamp
R 16
V
E
XXXX 8
A
De Bilt C Soesterberg
H 4
L
XXX
T 21 2
L
S Woudenberg Lunteren
Zeist Scherpenzeel
E
E
Bunnik Driebergen Maarn
Renswoude
I
XXX
15
De Klomp
Odijk 2 H XX
Rijsenburg Doorn E 2
U Ede
22 Veenendaal
Werkhoven V
Am
ste Leersum E 2 10
rda XX
m- L 4 Bennekom
Up Cothen
pe
rR
Amerongen R Elst
hin XX
eC R hine U
Schalkwijk an 19G Renkum
. XXX X 4
Wijk bij Duurstede e r
ow A Wageningen
L Rhenen 8
Eck en Wiel
Rijswijk Maurik
Culemborg (p Randwijk
Beusichem lan Lienden
ne
d)
46 Opheusden
NEDER BETUWE Kesteren
Zetten
Buren Zoelen
Dodewaard
X
44
Ochten
al
Beesd Buurmalsen B Wa XXX Druten
Tiel
Tricht L in g e
Rumpt Geldermalsen Leeuwen 24 Afferden
Wamel Puiflijk
Winssen
Cartografie: Louis Kaulartz / IMG / KL
LAND VAN
Meteren Horssen
Ophemert MAAS EN WAAL
TIELER WAARD Bergharen
Dreumel
Neerijnen Appeltern
Waardenburg 3 29 Hernen
Tuil Varik Megen
Opijnen Oijen Wijchen
M
Nieuwaal as Batenburg
Maasbommel
a
Zaltbommel Kessel
Ravenstein
Macharen Niftrik
Gameren Lith Haren
8 illustrations
Grebbeberg, outpost sector 11 May 1940
Dijkgraaf sche
I N U N D A T I O N
3 19
Landen
Voon
Hooge
Outpost line
Gr
Veen
ift
kampen burg
tank
or
slag
ditch
Hooi
Gr
eb 10.00 hrs.
be
12.30 hrs. Pomona
1 SSDF
landen
Kruiponder 12.30 hrs.
2 2-8 13.30 hrs. 12.00 hrs.
Front line 10.30 hrs.

13.30 hrs.
3 3-8
1 2-8 13.30 hrs.
Wageningen
16.00 hrs.
Maria Hoeve
Pumping station
a’s
Anna’s
Hoeve
12.00 hrs.
Heimerstein Brickworks
14.00 hrs.
2 1-8 12.30 hrs.

3 SSDF
1 3-8 Wolfswaard
Pothoek
15.00 hrs.
17.30 hrs.
Grebbeberg De Hoop
(former)
Hornwork
Klaver en
Wolfswaard
Pumping 1 1-8 Den Dooven
station Livonia
(former) orchard
Bastions
Brickworks sector boundary
E outpost line / front line
N
L
(a) light machine gun, position

W
Brickworks I
O
protected from fragmentation

De Blauwe Kamer Maneswaard
ER H (a) (b) (c) (b) heavy machine gun in steel turret
R (c) concrete casemate, so-called
‘Porcupine’ type (S-type)
(d) antitank gun in casemate
Ferry (e) M18 machine gun
(d) (e) (f) (f) 6-Veld field gun
Brickworks
Section of a weapon system
indicated in this area
German attack
0 250 500 m
15.00 hrs. time of position of German troops
illustrations 9
Grebbeberg
From the evening of 11 May until the very early morning of 13 May 1940

I N U N D A T I O N
arrival 13 May
1 20 HOOILANDEN
2 24 3 19
Gr
ift
3 29
or
1 29
Gr
eb
be
Achterberg
Kruiponder
Windmill
1 15
3 8
Rear line
Front line
Landmines
4 Stop line
Vreewijk
1 16 1 8
12 May
2 19 1 24 (-) afternoon
Anna’s
Hoeve
Rhenen Zoo 2 8 (-) Heimerstein
12 May 1 322
2 19 (-) 18.00 hrs.
+
2 19 20.45 hrs. 2 SSDF
Rye
field Pothoek
LO 1 46 (-) 12 May
12 May Grebbeberg
evening 12 May XX
WE R 4.00 hrs. 18.00 hrs. (former)
Hornwork 207
3 11(-) 1 8 (-) 3 SSDF
Brickworks
Pumping station 3 322
(under construction)
Livonia
R (former)
H Bastions
IN
E
Brickworks
De Blauwe Kamer
(a) light machine gun, position front line / stop line / rear line
(a) (b) (c) forward line of German troops
(b) heavy machine gun in steel turret
Ferry
(c) concrete casemate, so-called orchard
(d) antitank gun in concrete casemate
German attack
(d) (e) (f)
(e) M18 machine gun afternoon time of position of German troops
(f) 7-Veld field gun 0 250 500 m
Dutch counterattack
(g) (g) mortar
10 illustrations
Grebbeberg ±12.30 hrs. 13 May 1940

I N U N D A T I O N
HOOILANDEN
3 19
Gr
ift
1 15
or
Gr
2 24 eb
be
Achterberg
3 29
Kruiponder
3 8
Windmill 1st target line
Rear line 1 20
1 29 1 SSDF
1 46 (-)
Landmines
2 11
Vreewijk Stop line 2 SSDF
3 24
1 16 1 24 (-)
4 2 322 Anna’s
1 8 2 8 (-) Hoeve
Rhenen Zoo Heimerstein
XX
11 2 19 (-) 207
1 322
Rye
field Pothoek
LO 3 11(-) Grebbeberg
WE (Former)
R 3 SSDF (-) 3 322 Hornwork
1 8 (-)
Brickworks
Pumping station
(under construction)
Livonia
R (former)
H Bastions
IN
2 46
E
Brickworks
De Blauwe Kamer
(a) light machine gun, position front line / stop line / rear line
(a) (b) (c) forward line of German troops
(b) heavy machine gun in steel turret
Ferry
(c) concrete casemate, so-called orchard
(d) antitank gun in concrete casemate
German attack
(d) (e) (f)
(e) M18 machine gun afternoon time of position of German troops
(f) 7-Veld field gun 0 250 500 m
Dutch counterattack
(g) (g) mortar
illustrations 11
The battle at Scherpenzeel 13.30-20.00 hrs 13 May 1940
to
outpost sector according to

Ba
Mod
rn
German data March 1940 der-
beek Cana XX
ev
l
eld
German sector boundary 227
0 500 m. 1 km
l
erbeek na
to Am
Front line n- d Ca
Gli Canal
ek
er
be
Ne
sf
oo
-
rt
e
sch
Walderveen
Lunte r
ren
der
1 5 8 1 697 wo 227
nte
udsche
XX
sc
bee
ulu
k
he
2 366 (-) Cana 412

-
Me
l
21 Lunteren 328 (-)
4
XXX
be
ek
2 Ca
Scherpenzeel
Woudenberg bee
k 12 256
na
l
Renswoude 1 207
Stop line rensc
he
15 Lunte
Bro
3 4
eke
rs l o
De Groep
ot
(tank ditch) Outpost line

Emmikhuizen
De Klomp to E
de
Emmikhuizer-
berg
2 15 (tank ditch)
Roode Haan
227
1 19 XX
Oml.- Geldersch 207
Veenendaal
2 8 2 4
Can.
Veenendaal XX
Bi
ss
207
ch
Hondsenelleboog
op
22 2 X Benedeneind
D
av
10 X4
id
s-
Leersum
gr
ift
1 4 Middelbuurt
G
rif
Front line
t
or
Amerongen Gr
eb
be
12 illustrations
The attack by the 1. Kavalleriedivision 10-14 May 1940

WONS POSITION 0 10 km BORKUM
Inundation Zurich Pingjum NORTH SEA
Line of resistance ZURICH SECTOR SCHIERMONNIKOOG
Company sector boundary Gooium AMELAND
OST-
Em
KORNWERDER- WONS SECTOR
Hajum FRIESLAND
RW
s
ZAND
KORNWERDER- WADDEN SEA
43
GRONINGEN
Wons Emden
ZAND Zoutkamp
Kornwerd Dokkum Lauwers- Delfzijl
Schraard zee
11/5 Bedum
r Dam Kornwerderzand
VLIELAND
ee (Habour) al
Dollard
el
m Grijpskerk an
ss Kollum 10/5 sC
IJ
MAKKUM SECTOR
2 Em Nieuwolda 1
Makkum 12/5
BREEZAND Allingawier 12/5 11/5 Groningen
Idsegahuizen Harlingen na
l
Franeker Leeuwarden Marum GROEP GRONINGEN Ca
Winschoter- diep Winschoten
NORTH POSITION 1 FRIESLAND Eelde Veendam
WONS POSITION
TEXEL Bolsward Drachten Zuidlaren
Makkum 11/5
C-Stg Hd O
Sneek
TBF 10/5 Gieten
Den Helder Stadskanaal
DEN HELDER 1 Heerenveen Assen
art
POSITION Appelscha Q
Tjeuke
va
DRENTHE
Den Oever 12/5
ofd
Meer
10/5 Westerbork 2
Ho
Staveren 22 Lemmer
Beilen
11/5 Emmen
GROEP ASSEN
Medemblik Steenwijk 10/5 Sleen
he
Schagen
tsc
Petten
Echten
en
Dr
Enkhuizen Meppel Hoogeveen 1

WEST FRIESLAND F
NOORD- Hoorn Zwartsluis 10/5 Coevorden
Urk Schokland 21
C-Vg H
OVERIJSSEL
IJSSEL LINE Hardenberg 22
E
1
LIN
Ems
IJs
Kampen Ommen
se
TER
Ve
l
XXX
ch
IJmuiden Purmerend IJSSELMEER Zwolle TBO Nordhorn

t
WA
Marken Elburg 10
Zaandam
TCH
Haarlem AMSTERDAM O Warning line TBF sector of Territorial Commander in Friesland

DU
Nunspeet
NEW
LIN EBBE
HOLLAND Am Muiden Q Line of defence TBO sector of TerritorialAlmelo

Commander Oldenzaal
in Overijssel
Epe
sterdam
Line of defence C-Stg Hd

Commander of Den Helder Position
E
Hoofddorp F
GR
DEFENCE LINE Holten Hengelo

IJs
OF AMSTERDAM Naarden Dutch sector boundary C-Vg H Commander ofn.Fortress Holland

sel
Deventer
a Enschede Gronau
German sector boundary
Apeldoorn tek
en
AdvanceTwroute 11/5 Date of advance
Rijn-
ZUID- Hilversum
National border
Leiden
HOLLAND
Ca
na Amersfoort Provincial border Zutphen HNLMS Johan Maurits van Nassau
Lochem
l UTRECHT
illustrations 13
The Moerdijk-Rotterdam axis 10-13 May 1940

Overschie Schoonhoven
Kethel el
Maasland ROTTERDAM ss Ouderkerk a/d IJssel
IJ Ammerstol Nieuwpoort
Maassluis Bergambacht
Capelle a/d IJssel
Vlaardingen SCHIEDAM Groot-Ammers
Krimpen a/d IJssel
K
Rozenburg SC
HE
Lekkerkerk LE
UR NIEUWE MAAS IJsselmonde Krimpen a/d Lek Streefkerk Goudriaan
Noordeloos
Nieuwenhoorn Pernis Slikkerveer Nw.-Lekkerkerk
M AAS Waalhaven Kinderdijk
O UDE Ridderkerk Bleskensgraaf
Heenvliet Hoogvliet Airfield
Geervliet Alblasserdam
Barendrecht Oostendam 10 May Neder-Slingeland XX
XX
Carto
Rhoon end of
Oud-Alblas
Abbenbroek Portugaal O afternoon
Spijkenisse UDE 7 Rijsoord H.I.Ambacht Wijngaarden
Hekelingen Goidschalxoord Papendrecht Giessendam
Heerjansdam
Heerjansd
Oudenhoorn Heinenoord Zwijndrecht
drecht Gorinchem
Zuidland Oud-
Beijerland Puttershoek Sliedrecht Hardinxveld
SPU Blaak MAA DORDRECHT
I Nieuw-Beijerland 11 May 3 S
Goudswaard Werkendam
D
morning BEDIJKTE Krispijn Dubbeldam RWE E
HA
RI Piershil BINNEN MAAS
Wieldrecht MEvan 't Land
Kop
NG Westmaas Maasdam I s l a n d
12 May
Zwartsluisje H O E K S E 's-Gravendeel of evening Nieuwendijk
KIL
Klaaswaal 10-11 May Dordrecht

Zuid-Beijerland night 2 28 Tweede Tol B I E S B O S C H
Stad aan E
Mookhoek W
't Haringvliet Strijen EU
TIENGEMETEN Schenkeldijkk NI Hank
Middelsluis Dussen
W A A R D Willemsdorp
HE
VL Numansdorp Strijensas DIEPLage-Zwaluwe AM BERGSC
IE ER MAAS
Den Bommel T DS
AN
LL 10 May Geertruidenberg OUD
E
Willemstad HO afternoon Drimmelen MAASJE
Moerdijk 6 Waspik
Oude-Tonge Hoge-Zwaluwe Raamsdonksveer
Made
Ooltgensplaat Raamsdonk
Noordschans
nbergschen- Hoek
Zevenbergschen-
KR Den Hout 's-Gravenmoer
AM RAK Klundert Wagenberg
ME K E
R VOL DI Zevenbergen Oosterhout Horst
NT Langeweg Terheijden
Dinteloord Fijnaart MARK
EL
NAL XX
Hazeldonk CA WILH
ELM
0 5 km
Stampersgat Standdaarbuiten Teteringen
INA
9 CA
N.
14 illustrations
Dordtsche Kil and surrounding area

's-Gravendeel Steam ferry Reeweg- Zuid
Wieldrecht Amstelwijck
Wieldrechtsche
Gravestein
Krab-en Landzicht
church
Kil weg
We
Schenkeltje
stkil
Nieuw- mill
water tower Kil dyke
Polder
Trek-
Pumping station
Wieldrecht
Bonaventura Wielhoven Church

KIL
et
damsche Vli Tweede Tol
de
Killezigt
Ou
Beerwijk
Nieuwe
Catharinahoeve
Langen Dam Polder
Vlo
pumping Oude
ekw
Ou
station Beer
de
Beer eg
Be
Mookhoek polder
er
polder
jk
di
M
De Wacht er
el
k
Nieuwe Be
Mookhoek polder
we
g
Beneden
dij
polder
Meerkoot
DORDTSCHE
Den Engel
Strijensche
jk
t di
om
ch
Bo Koperen
Wa
Polder polder
Kooi- Brabers
landsche Electric
pumping Oude polder
station Ferry
Gorze
Polder
Polder
polder
Oud-
Stoope Willemsdorp
k
Bevers-
endij
oord
Ferry
Sass
Polder
DIEP
Maria Bouwlust
A NDS 0 500 m
polder HOLL
illustrations 15
Rotterdam city centre 10 May 1940
German positions on the Noordereiland
RIJWEG
German position under slip road to GOUDSCHE
Willems bridge (Willemsbrug)
STRAAT
German floatplane VEE OU
N
DE
MARKT
LAA
SINGEL
R.
route of German troops
ET
VEEMARKTST
T
DE GROO
VLI
Positions of Dutch troops DI
JK
Dutch patrols
BOEZEM
LAN
GE
GE
TA
WAR
important objects AND
AN
AK
E
PL
SLA
OOSTERSTR.
HUGO
WILLEMSSTR.
1 Maashotel 4 Hotel Weimar
E
HOOG
BOEZEM
2 Nat. Levensverz. Mij. 5 Maasstation
PTE
3 Witte Huis 6 Koningsbrug
EM
GED
E
UW
railway tram GOUDS
CHE SIN
NIE
GEL OOST
PLEIN
ANSTR.
v.SPA LO OST
ER
ER K OOS
ACHT
NT TZE
E
EE TRA
AT AAT
M KIPS STR NDA
AL
ENE
OTE RKT GRO BOE
GRO KAA
SMA IGER REN ADM DIJ
STE N IRA K
G REN VE LITE
KPL
EIN HOO R BOE HA VEN ITS
KER E KAD
ENS
TEIG HA E
AAT MIDD
STR E IET T
ENS OTE
GRO RKT UW VL IE GAT
AUR NIE UWE NG GVL
ST.L MA RI Maasstation
NIE HA ARIN IET
H VL 5
Station 4 R ING
Beurs OUDE HA
HA
IN
LAAK PLE DE
VE
NOO
RDB URS RKA
N
A K BE STE
BLA AK AAT 3 OO
POS
BLA STR 6
K
ZUID
W ER
THO
N pedestrian ferry
W IJ
EN N
HAV AVE
AS
ORN
H 2 L
11 16
HAVEN
BO
MA
EN
HAVEN
N
WIJVEN
STR
AV
N
WIJ NHA 1
H
N
WIJ
.
VE
HA pedestrian
S MAASKADE
ER ferry
H JUFFERSTRAAT
AK
W
S
M
ES
IL
ER
LE
PJ
AK
M
M
N O O R D E R -
SB
M
LEUVEHAVEN
O
BO
R
LEUVE
NASSAU-
G
DE
LEUVE
N
P
KA
VE
EE
E
EP HA AD
SC
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SC W AN SS
EU
M
FF NA
NI
O IN
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.H E
G L
R P
U K
B RI
OR
ND
AN
E
AN
E
H
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JE
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BO
SE
IK
S-
AA
R
OM
D
M
EN
.H ING
PR N
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ÔT
ENT VEN
11 16 HA
DE
ST
S
IN
PR
RA
KA
ST
AT
pedestrian ferry ST BI
RA
UW NN
EN
AT
S
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SP
M
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N
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RW TR
W
pedestrian ferry EG AA
HA T
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N
16 illustrations
CHAPTER ONE
INTRODUCTION
The Netherlands and the war
In the Netherlands, the 1940-45 period is referred to as ‘the war’. In all its
simplicity, that designation illustrates the huge significance of the Second
World War in the collective memory of the Dutch people. The choice of
word itself is remarkable. The actual war experience was limited to five
days in May 1940, when the Dutch armed forces fought and lost the battle
against the Germans, and the period from mid-September 1944 to May
1945, when the Allies recaptured Dutch territory. In the latter operations,
the Dutch armed forces played a modest and rather symbolic role. The
1940-45 years were more of a history of occupation than a war experi-
ence. Nevertheless, the Dutch people who lived through this period are
not inclined to divide their lives into ‘before and after the occupation’. The
common parlance is ‘before the war’ and ‘after the war’.
In 1940, the Dutch people in general, and the Dutch armed forces in
particular, were inexperienced when it came to war. The most recent war
experience had been over a century ago. This was in 1830-32, when King
William I endeavoured, in vain, to put a stop by force of arms to the se-
cession of the southern Netherlands, present-day Belgium, from his king-
dom.
In attaching such exceptional significance to the 1940-45 period, the
Netherlands stands out from many other European countries, where that
place is occupied by the First World War. There, the ‘Great War’ marks a
turning point in the history of European civilisation. In the Netherlands,
it is impossible for the experience of 1914-18 to have the same intensity.
The country was neutral during those years and the mobilised army saw
no action at all. Although Dutch neutrality was threatened on several oc-
casions, and the country suffered many adverse consequences of the war,
the Netherlands underwent what were terrible years for the rest of Europe
May 1940: a
cartoon by L.J.
Jordaan expresses
the indignation
about the German
attack on the
Netherlands
(left); entrances
to Amsterdam
Central Station
are being closed
(below).
introduction 3
as a relative outsider. It was not until the Second World War that the aver-
age Dutchman was confronted personally with modern warfare.
Dutch neutrality in 1914-18 had been no coincidence. Since the mid-
nineteenth century, the Netherlands had remained as detached as possible
from the developments in the power politics between the neighbouring
great powers, Germany, France and Britain. In the hundred years pre-
ceding 1940, the notions of aloofness and neutrality developed into per-
manent values in Dutch strategic culture and became all but articles of
faith in the political and social set of values. The country was even able
to derive a certain feeling of moral superiority from these ideas. Whereas
the great powers determined their positions in international relations by
means of power and force—reprehensible instruments in the eyes of many
Dutch people—the Netherlands liked to think of itself as a shining exam-
ple of the workings of international law. This self-image was undoubtedly
misleading. It did not rhyme with the bloody wars through which the co-
lonial administration subjected the Netherlands East Indies on the other
side of the world. It also overlooked the fact that, as a “satisfied nation”,
the Netherlands only stood to lose from participation in an armed con-
flict. If the Netherlands were to choose the path of rapprochement with
Germany in peacetime, it would run the risk of Britain taking control of
the Dutch colonies in Asia. If support from Britain were sought, Germany
could be tempted to carry out a preventive strike on Dutch territory.
That was the situation the Netherlands faced in 1940. A country and
an army without recent war experience, a country which, strengthened by
the favourable experiences of 1914-18, hoped to be able to remain neu-
tral again, and a country with an introverted, mainly bourgeois culture.
Values such as order and authority, peacefulness, patriotism, industry and
self-restraint took precedence over martial values such as glory, valour or
self-sacrifice.
The shock
All these aspects will be discussed in greater detail in later chapters of

this book, but it is useful to point them out briefly here as well. They can
explain the enormity of the shock caused by the German invasion of the
Netherlands on 10 May 1940. For any individual or society, war is one
of the most devastating occurrences possible. It is an experience which
disrupts normal life entirely. For the people of the Netherlands, however,
inexperienced and mentally unprepared as they were, the shock was par-
4 chapter one
ticularly severe. And that was not all. Within five days the fight ended in
a crushing defeat. The defeat was worse than had been anticipated and
came sooner. The general assumption was that the armed forces would be
able to put up resistance for several weeks and that allies would come to
their assistance in the meantime in order to turn the tide. The capitulation
on 14 May 1940 dealt a harsh blow to this perspective. It was a traumatic
experience.
The leading Dutch military journal De Militaire Spectator began its
July 1940 issue with a brief review of recent events: “It has now been two
months since we began our struggle against an attack by our all-powerful
neighbour, equipped with the most up-to-date resources and inspired by
an indomitable urge to attack, which was not our enemy up to the point of
the attack, and still our thoughts and feelings are dominated by that one
thing, the mere Five-Day War”.
This sentiment was not limited to the military, but permeated society
as a whole. It is therefore no wonder that, even during those five days of
the war, explanations for the developing catastrophe were already circu-
lating. Some were harsh in their judgements on the shortcomings of the
Dutch armed forces. Others clung to deeds which gave encouragement
and which could inspire them not to resign themselves to German occu-
pation. From those five days of war, an image emerged that was very well
suited to softening the pain of defeat.
An important element of that image was the indignation at the, in
Dutch eyes, unexpected and treacherous manner in which the German
armed forces had assaulted the country. That indignation was motivated
by the constant hope of remaining neutral in the impending Europe-wide
war. It was in that spirit that Queen Wilhelmina addressed her people in a
proclamation on 10 May 1940, saying: “After our country had, with scru-
pulous precision, observed absolute neutrality all these months and while
it had no other intention but to maintain that attitude strictly and consist-
ently, last night the German armed forces, without any warning whatso-
ever, carried out a sudden attack on our territory.”
The first opinions were also soon expressed regarding the course of the
battle. Both the army, including the air forces, and the navy had put up a
brave fight. However, as the commander-in-chief, General H.G. Winkel-
man, put it in his radio broadcast in which he announced the capitulation,
“the fight was too one-sided, our troops were up against technological as-
sets for which even the greatest of human courage would be no match”.1
1 V.E. Nierstrasz, Inleiding en algemeen overzicht van de gevechtsdagen van 10-19 mei
1940 (The Hague, 1957) 291.
Damage caused during an aerial attack on Schiphol airport on 10 May.
Bombs dropped by a German aircraft ruined twelve houses in Amsterdam,

killing 44 civilians, on 12 May.
6 chapter one
Everyone knew what the general was referring to: tanks, modern aircraft,
paratroops and air-transportable units. Furthermore, the swift defeat was
generally attributed to the poor armament and equipment of the Dutch
armed forces.
In addition, according to general opinion, as if their technological su-
periority were not enough, the Germans also availed themselves of im-
proper combat methods, violated the law of war and received assistance
from a fifth column of German agents and Dutch traitors. In that respect,
it was important to note that in one of the key theatres of war, the Grebbe-
berg, an SS regiment had been involved in the fighting. Official announce-
ments also influenced public opinion during the fighting. For instance,
the statements by the Dutch General Headquarters on 10 May 1940 spoke
of German paratroops disguised in Dutch uniforms, reported a German
officer who threatened to kill Dutch prisoners of war and cried shame
over German soldiers using prisoners of war as human shields.
In retrospect, the image of the battle thus created was an intriguing
combination of truths and half-truths. During the war and shortly after,
it provided an initial explanation for the rapid defeat. It may even be bet-
ter not to speak of an explanation, but rather of justification of the de-
feat. What people needed was not so much knowledge of the full facts, but
rather a representation of events that would make the humiliating defeat
bearable. The German superiority combined with the treachery and deceit
gave the defeat an element of inevitability, bitter though it was. That shift-
ed some of the responsibility for the defeat. One of the key Dutch histori-
ans specialised in the Second World War, Lou de Jong, characterised pub-
lic opinion as a “simultaneously dramatic and romantic simplification, the
bottom line of which was that the Germans, had they only implemented
normal combat methods, would not have been able to subdue the coura-
geous and heroic Netherlands. It had required abnormal, indeed criminal
combat methods”.2
Although, as was mentioned earlier, reproaches were heaped on the
armed forces immediately after capitulation regarding the brevity of their
resistance, the view soon took root that that same weak army had man-
aged to halt, or at least delay, the German advance in several places. And
the Wehrmacht, it seemed, had paid a high price. All in all, it had still
taken the Germans five days to conquer the small country, much long-
er than they would have assumed beforehand. The losses had been sub-
stantial, particularly at the IJsselmeer Dam, at the Grebbeberg and in the
2 L. de Jong, Het Koninkrijk der Nederlanden in de Tweede Wereldoorlog. Deel 3 Mei ’40
(The Hague, 1970) 520.
introduction 7
Hague area. This had caused the former two of those theatres of war to be
dubbed ‘the Dam of Death’ and ‘the Devil’s Hill’, respectively. The greatest
achievement of the Dutch army had been the elimination of the air-trans-
portable troops in the Hague area. This German elite unit, as it was soon
referred to, failed to capture the airfields around The Hague and was de-
pleted as a result of casualties and capture. In addition, the Marine Corps,
known as the ‘Black Devils’, had made it so difficult for the Germans in
Rotterdam, that the latter had had to resort to a full-blown act of terror:
an aerial bombardment which razed the entire historic city centre to the
ground. Rotterdam thus suffered a fate similar to that of Warsaw, and later
Coventry and London.
Considering the circumstances in 1940 and the years of occupation
which followed, the image portrayed above was unmistakably justified. It
made the defeat bearable and, by emphasising the high German casualty
figures, gave meaning and significance to the sacrifices made. Moreover, it
also served the country beyond its borders, where the government in exile
in London had to convince the allies that the previously neutral Nether-
lands was a valuable ally and deserved allied support on account of its re-
sistance to the German aggression. The government propaganda based on
this image had the desired effect. Partly on that basis, the Daily Telegraph
was able to say of the Dutch soldiers on 10 July 1941: “It is safe to go tiger-
shooting with them”.3
The questions
In the bigger picture of the war between Germany and the allies, the con-
quest of the Netherlands in May 1940 was only of minor importance. The
main objective of Fall Gelb was to defeat the French armed forces and
the British expeditionary force which had come to their aid. The point
of main effort of the German attack lay in the advance through northern
France, via the Meuse crossing at Sedan to the Channel coast at Abbeville.
By comparison, the attack on the Netherlands was a secondary mission on
the far-right flank, covering the operations in Belgium. That does not de-
tract from the fact, however, that the attack on the Netherlands contained
a number of elements which gave it a more general significance, exceed-
ing the Dutch theatre of war.
Winkelman’s proclamation, as quoted above, attributes the German
victory to the German superiority in modern weapons. At first glance
3 Cited in E.N. van Kleffens, Belevenissen II 1940-1958 (Alphen aan den Rijn, 1983) 27.
A poster of the Prins
Bernhard Fonds and
Spitfire Fonds to
acquire funding for war
materials depicts the air
attack on Rotterdam
(left); the destruction in
Rotterdam after the aerial
bombardment of the city on
14 May (below).
introduction 9
there is something to be said for that. An armoured division had operated

in the southern half of the Netherlands and the attack on the airfields near
The Hague and the bridges on the Dordrecht-Rotterdam axis was unique.
It was the first time that an entire airborne corps went into action. In the
opening phase of the conflict, it was supported by strong air forces. In ad-
dition, a great many motorised infantry units operated on Dutch territory.
The armoured division mentioned earlier was followed by a motorised SS
infantry division, and facing the Grebbe Line, north of the Rhine, were
two motorised SS infantry regiments.
During the 1940 campaign, tanks, motorised infantry and air forces
were the instruments of the Blitzkrieg. That term is central in all discus-
sions on and analyses of the war in 1940 and it is also true for the opera-
tions against the Netherlands, which in the Dutch view, after all, had led
to Dutch capitulation much faster than the high command, the govern-
ment and the people had expected. Recent research, however, in particu-
lar that by Karl-Heinz Frieser, has shown that the German success in 1940
was not so much underpinned by a well-developed and broadly supported
Blitzkrieg doctrine, but rather was strongly dependent on improvisation
and even insubordination on the part of a small group of generals.4 This
raises the interesting question as to the significance of those modern com-
bat assets for the German operations on Dutch territory. In this respect,
it is also important to ask the question to what extent the German attack
on the Netherlands was a strategic raid. Clarity should also be sought as
to the significance of the losses in personnel and materiel inflicted on the
corps. How substantial were those losses and to what extent did they af-
fect later German operations such as the intended invasion of the English
coast (Operation Seelöwe) and the attack on Crete (Operation Merkur)?
The deployment of SS units on Dutch soil is also remarkable. Later, on
the eastern front in the war against the Soviet Union, the SS played an
active part in the Vernichtungskrieg against the Russian population in gen-
eral and the Jews in particular. During those operations, the law of war
was grossly and systematically violated. There are also records of German
violations of the law of war in the Dutch theatre of war in 1940, and some
of those instances involved SS soldiers. The question arises to what extent
those violations were due to the National Socialist origins of the SS and
whether other factors were involved.
The law of war and the possibly criminal nature of the German actions
are also important to the debate on the nature and significance of the
bombing of Rotterdam on 14 May 1940, immediately prior to the Dutch
4 Karl-Heinz Frieser, Blitzkrieg-Legende. Der Westfeldzug 1940 (Munich, 1995).
10 chapter one
capitulation. What preceded the bombing, was it a tactical, strategic or

even a terror bombing? And how did the bombing relate to the possible
German fear that the operations in the Netherlands might take longer
than had been assumed beforehand, thus jeopardising the operations in
France?
Considering these questions may lead to the conclusion that they re-
semble the questions that were being asked immediately after the German
invasion. The fact that they are being dealt with again in this book stems
from a different need, however, from that in 1940. Then, the motives were
outrage over the injustice that had been suffered and the process of coping
with a traumatic experience. This book focuses on factual research, criti-
cal analysis and scientific curiosity.
A number of further questions are also significant. It is a commonplace
to say that an army generally can fight no better than the quality of the
preparations for an imminent conflict allows. The question is, therefore,
whether a different defence policy in the years leading up to the war could
have led to a different outcome in the battle. Were the policy of neutral-
ity and the derived military strategy a wise choice? Would a higher de-
fence budget and earlier rearmament have made any difference? Are the
political and military leadership to blame in this respect? To what extent
was the chosen system of force generation (army organisation and staff-
ing) responsible for the defeat? The answers to these questions must, of
course, take into account the strategy, the operation plan and the tactical
operations of the opponent, the German Wehrmacht, as well as the latter’s
equipment, level of training and structure.
Underlying these questions is another, more important, fundamental
question. Was there an alternative in the interwar period for the Dutch
defence policy, and more generally the war preparations as a whole, which
would have provided a better chance of a more favourable outcome to a
future war? The Netherlands was a small country, surrounded by large
powers which were highly likely to go to war with each other once again.
In the eyes of the Dutch defence planners, the First World War, with its
destruction and violence on a massive, industrial scale, served as the
model for the impending war. But in such an orgy of violence, what would
be an effective way to defend the country, given the limited Dutch re-
sources, the small population number and the small territory? Was it even
possible anymore to solve the problem of the Dutch territorial defence in
a time of total war? Only if we include these fundamental questions in our
considerations will we be able to form a balanced judgement on the old
problem of the “mere Five-Day War”.
On 16 May, German
troops marched into
Amsterdam(right),
including motor units
of SS Regiment ‘Adolf
Hitler’ (below).
12 chapter one
These questions have determined the structure of this book. This intro-
duction is followed by an overview of international politics in the 1920s
and 1930s, focusing in particular on the political developments in Ger-
many. The next two chapters look at how the Netherlands and Germany
made their military preparations for another war in Europe, with the fo-
cus on the strategies and the operation plans. Chapter 5 deals with the
execution of the German and Dutch campaign plans, from the opening of
hostilities to the Dutch capitulation. It shows how the Dutch command-
er-in-chief and the Commander of the Field Army on the one hand, and
their opponents, Army Group B commander Fedor von Bock and 18th
Army commander Georg von Küchler on the other hand, led their respec-
tive operations. The five subsequent chapters discuss, at the tactical level,
the course of the battles in the various theatres of operations. The con-
cluding chapter takes stock, analyses the battle and answers the questions
which lie at the basis of this study.
CHAPTER TWO
THE EMERGENCE OF THE GERMAN THREAT
The consequences of the First World War
On 11 November 1918, the guns fell silent in Western Europe; an armi-

stice had brought an end to the First World War. In London, Big Ben’s
chimes heralded an end to four years of war, and people danced in the
streets of Britain and France. A bloody nightmare had come to an end and
the people of Europe were preparing to resume their lives as they were be-
fore August 1914. The war, however, had changed their world drastically.
To start with, the political map of Europe bore little resemblance to that of
1914. Three mighty empires, Germany, Austria-Hungary and Russia, had
fallen. In Germany, the defeat had cost Kaiser Wilhelm II his position. His
downfall began with the actions of the Erster Generalquartiermeister of
the German army, General Erich Ludendorff. The latter had reached the
conclusion in September 1918 that the war was lost and had insisted that
the Kaiser appoint a government that would have enough support among
the population. That new government should then immediately begin ne-
gotiations with the allied powers. Ludendorff ’s intentions in this respect
were twofold. He hoped to win time in order to regroup his armies, while
at the same time the civilian government would carry all the blame for
the defeat, should that defeat become inevitable. The army would thus be
spared the anger of the disappointed German people. Wilhelm followed
Ludendorff ’s advice and appointed the liberal prince Max von Baden as
Reichskanzler. A number of reforms were carried out in October, and
Germany became a constitutional monarchy.
These reforms did not go far enough, however, for the American presi-
dent, Woodrow Wilson, who occupied a prominent position in the allied
camp. He wanted a more democratic German government and refused to
negotiate a possible armistice. Many Germans, meanwhile, lost their faith
in Wilhelm II. The idea that a republican government would be better able
to come to an agreement with the allies was gaining ground. On 3 Novem-
ber, sailors in Kiel revolted, revolutionary councils were formed in various
14 chapter two
towns and the social democrats in the government threatened to resign

unless the Kaiser abdicated. On 9 November, Wilhelm decided to give up,
and fled to the Netherlands. The armistice was agreed two days later.
The Weimar Republic, named after the town in which the constitution
for the new state was drawn up, was therefore not the result of a conscious
choice on the part of the German population. The empire collapsed be-
cause the allies demanded it, because the Germans longed for peace and
because the German army leadership wanted to save face. The latter was
accomplished; when the war came to an end, the army was still in France,
its organisation was intact and not a single shot had been fired on Ger-
man soil. It would later therefore be said that the army had never been de-
feated, but that it had been stabbed in the back by the home front. In the
1920s, Adolf Hitler was to describe the German defeat as “the greatest vil-
lainy of the century”, committed by “November criminals”. This was what
prompted him to go into politics: “And I resolved to become a politician.”1
It would not be an exaggeration to say that the Weimar Republic was born
under an unlucky star.
The First World War also ended the tsars’ rule in Russia. Two revo-
lutions, one in March 1917 and one in November of the same year, had
eventually established a Bolshevist regime, led by the professional revo-
lutionary Vladimir Ilyich Lenin. The new government was to make peace
with Germany at Brest-Litovsk in 1918, abandoning the allied cause. This
contributed to the Bolshevist Soviet Union becoming a pariah in the in-
ternational community, misunderstood, distrusted and abhorred by the
entire world.
Lastly, at the end of the war, the Habsburg Empire made way for sev-
eral new nation states: Czechoslovakia, Poland, Austria, Hungary and Yu-
goslavia. Politically, Central Europe became a patchwork, with plenty of
material to serve as the basis for an international conflict. After all, every
country had a significant number of ethnic minorities within its borders,
such as the Sudeten Germans in Czechoslovakia.
The First World War did not, however, only have direct political conse-
quences. The financial situation in the world had also changed consider-
ably. The war had drained the finances of the European powers. They had
gone from being creditors to being debtors. For instance, the allied pow-
ers, Britain, France and Italy, owed the United States some seven billion
dollars. Europe also lost export markets in Latin America and Asia. As a
1 Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf. The First Complete and Unexpurgated Edition Published in
the English Language (New York, 1939) 204.
the emergence of the german threat 15
result, after the war, almost every single government in Europe was faced
with budget problems, increased by the many welfare payments to war
widows and war invalids. There was little money to rebuild the Europe-
an societies after the massive destruction. None of the governments were
able to live up to the high expectations in their countries.
Lastly, the First World War decimated an entire generation from a de-
mographic point of view. In total, some 8.5 million people in Europe had
been killed and over 20 million had been wounded, many of whom were
crippled for life. Germany counted around 6 million dead and wounded;
France around 5.5 million. An entire generation had been left behind on
the battlefield. In the years following 1918, therefore, Europe was to be
led by statesmen and soldiers who already had been in control during the
First World War. The European population continued to expect leader-
ship from old men such as Paul von Hindenburg and Henri Pétain.
What then, were the direct consequences of the First World War for the
Netherlands? At first it seemed as if the government’s policy of neutrality
had been successful: the country had remained outside the theatre of war.
This was generally attributed to the modernisation of the army, which on
the eve of the war had led to a significant increase in combat power, and
to the cautious foreign policy, which was aimed at removing any reasons
a possible enemy might have for attacking the country. Only later would
it emerge that it was largely thanks to the own interests of the warring na-
tions that the Netherlands had been able to remain neutral.2
Staying out of range during the war widely confirmed the idea that for
the Netherlands, the traditional policy in the areas of foreign politics and
defence, a policy in which aloofness and neutrality were key concepts, was
also the right choice for the twentieth century. In addition, in Europe and
certainly also in the Netherlands, the atrocities of the battlefields of the
First World War had fuelled the optimistic expectation that in the future
nobody would settle political disputes by armed conflict anymore. In this
respect also, therefore, the experiences of the war meant an enhancement
of the neutrality policy, or as Minister of Foreign Affairs jonkheer H.A.
van Karnebeek preferred to call it after the Netherlands joined the League
of Nations, the self-reliance policy.
2 L. de Jong, Het Koninkrijk der Nederlanden in de Tweede Wereldoorlog. Deel 1, Voor-

spel (The Hague, 1969) 38-71. J.A. Fortuin, “Nederland en het Schlieffenplan. Een onder-
zoek naar de positie van Nederland in het Duitse aanvalsplan voor de Eerste Wereldoorlog”,
Militaire Spectator, CXLIX (1980) 21-35. F. Snapper, “De gevechtswaarde van de Neder-
landse landmacht in de periode 1914-1918 en in 1940”, Mededelingen van de Sectie Militaire
Geschiedenis Landmachtstaf, III (1980) 30-35. R. van Diepen, Voor Volkenbond en vrede.
Nederland en het streven naar een nieuwe wereldorde 1919-1946 (Amsterdam, 1999) 32.
16 chapter two
Versailles
Although it was true that, after 11 November 1918, the fighting ceased in
Western Europe, what was lacking was a peace treaty between the allies
and the defeated nations. To this end, the leaders of the world gathered
in Paris. The key players were, on behalf of the United States, the dour
puritan Wilson, who wanted to punish guilty Germany and reform the
world through his League of Nations; on behalf of France, the staunch na-
tionalist Georges Clemenceau, le père de la victoire, who wanted to curb
the German danger for good; and on behalf of the United Kingdom, the
fickle Welshman David Lloyd George, who was really more interested in
his country’s domestic politics.
The eventual results of the peace negotiations, as laid down in the Trea-
ties of Paris, the best known of which is the Treaty of Versailles with Ger-
many, were the products of a compromise between the three allied lead-
ers. For instance, France gave Wilson the space to achieve his League of
Nations ideal, although countries such as Germany and the Soviet Union
were barred from membership. In return, the Treaty of Versailles includ-
ed stipulations which were to make renewed action by Germany against
France impossible. Initially, France wanted to make the German Rhine-
land into an independent state, which would be under the supervision of
the allies. When this plan was rejected by the US and Britain, at Clem-
enceau’s insistence the allies signed a treaty of guarantee which promised
France immediate support in the event of German attack. In addition,
France was given control of the coal mines in the Saarland, which was to
be governed by the League of Nations, Alsace-Lorraine was returned to
France and France was to receive large sums in reparation from Germany.
The German army was to withdraw from the Rhineland and was not
to exceed 100,000 men. The latter stipulation, however, did not spell the
end of this army. As the allies had banned conscription in Germany, it be-
came a highly skilled and professional organisation. In addition, Germany
lost all its colonies, was to relinquish large areas in the east to Poland, in-
cluding the mining area of Silicia, lost Danzig and was officially given the
blame for the First World War. In Germany, it was therefore referred to as
der große Betrug von Versailles and the Germans felt they had been unduly
humiliated.
In the end, the Treaty of Versailles did not bring the lasting peace
which it had been intended to bring. It played into the hands of the group
surrounding Ludendorff, and discredited the parties which supported the
Weimar Republic and signed the treaty. Versailles was both too harsh and
In 1925, with the signature of the Treaty of Locarno,
the Weimar Republic accepted its western borders.
German continued to harbour objections against the
border with Poland, to which it had had to cede large
areas of land in 1919 (right); 19 October 1930:
the National Socialist Sturmabteilung demonstrating
in Neu-Brandenburg against the uniform ban (below).
18 chapter two
too weak where Germany was concerned: too harsh because it punished
the Germans disproportionately for the events between 1914 and 1918,
and too weak because Germany’s core was allowed to remain intact. From
an economic, political and military point of view, Germany remained a
potential world power, which would be sure to seek possibilities to review
the Treaty of Versailles. In the end, the treaty did not provide France with
the security it wanted either. The US Senate refused to ratify the treaties,
so that the Franco-British-American guarantee treaty came to nothing.
Therefore, when the peace treaty of Versailles was signed on 28 June 1919,
the French maréchal Ferdinand Foch said: “This is not peace, it is a twenty-
year truce.”3
The 1920s: seeking stability
International politics in the early 1920s centred around Franco-German

relations. As has been said earlier, France was very disappointed by the
results of the peace talks in Paris. The Rhineland had remained part of
the German Reich, and the Franco-British-American treaty of guarantee
had not materialised. All France could therefore do was to strive for strict
enforcement of the stipulations of the Treaty of Versailles. In 1923, it even
occupied the Ruhr area, in order to force Germany to make the repara-
tion payments it had been ordered to pay. This resulted in a huge increase
in inflation, hitting the German middle class the hardest. France also en-
tered into alliances with the new states in Eastern Europe: an alliance trea-
ty with Poland in 1921, with Czechoslovakia in 1924, with Yugoslavia in
1926 and with Romania in 1927.
In Rapallo in 1922, Germany in turn signed a treaty with the other
pariah of the international community, the Soviet Union. Both states re-
linquished all reparation payments, established diplomatic ties and im-
proved their economic relationship. Close military cooperation was estab-
lished in secret. German soldiers provided instruction to the Red Army
and in turn were provided with training facilities, and were thus able to
maintain a high standard.
The tension between France and Germany was reduced significantly
when the Dawes Plan, named after the American banker Charles G. Dawes,
was accepted in 1924. This plan entailed France’s withdrawal from the Ruhr
area, arranged the German reparation payments and made it possible for
3 See: H.L. Wesseling, Vele ideeën over Frankrijk. Opstellen over geschiedenis en cultuur
(Amsterdam, 1987) 238.
the Weimar Republic to borrow significant sums of money, in order to al-

low the economy to recover. International politics appeared to be entering
calmer waters. There was a prospect of a stable international order.
A clear sign in this respect was the signing of the Treaties of Locarno
in 1925. In those treaties, Germany accepted its western border as estab-
lished in the Treaty of Versailles. It was also determined that Germany or
France would receive military support from Britain and Italy in the event
of an act of aggression by the one against the other. Interesting to note is
the fact that remilitarisation of the Rhineland, if it were to occur, would be
considered to be an act of aggression. The Treaties of Locarno also enabled
Germany to become a member of the League of Nations. Nonetheless, ‘Lo-
carno’ did not mean a fundamental change in international relations. The
stipulations of Versailles remained in force, which was a constant source
of dissatisfaction for the Germans. Germany did not accept the borders in
Eastern Europe, continued to circumvent the disarmament regulations and
in 1926 strengthened its relationship with the Soviet Union.
Still, in 1925, there was a collective sigh of relief over ‘the spirit of Lo-
carno’. In 1928, 65 nations even signed the Kellogg-Briand pact, deciding
to abolish war as a means of resolving international conflicts. In practice,
however, this pact, too, had little significance. For instance, not a single
agreement was made on sanctions in the event of military aggression. The
Dutch historian A.F. Manning therefore wrote: “The real value? Well, it
was an example of diplomacy of the street, adopted by statesmen. A dem-
onstration of the ancient nostalgia for peace.”4
Nonetheless, the aversion to violence that had grown since the Great War
and the apparent international détente fuelled the antimilitarism already
present in the Netherlands. The expansion of the fleet, considered neces-
sary by the government and proposed in the 1922 Fleet Act, was not car-
ried out, under massive pressure from the population. Government policy
itself was also adapted to the decreased military threat. Defence expenditure
remained at a low level throughout the 1920s. As a result, in 1922, the dura-
tion of the initial term of service for conscripts was limited to five and a half
months, the armament was weak and growing out of date, and the enthusi-
asm for a career as an officer was declining. For the sake of its security, the
Netherlands was hoping that a stable balance of power would be restored in
Europe and had expectations, be they rather reserved, of the symbol of the
apparently organised and stable world order, the League of Nations.
4 A.F. Manning, “Bankroet der optimisten. De politieke constellatie van Europa: 1933”
in: A.H. Paape e.a., eds, Bericht van de Tweede Wereldoorlog (Amsterdam, 1970-1975) 59.
See also: Van Diepen, Voor Volkenbond en vrede, 73-75.
20 chapter two
Fascism and National Socialism
Despite the calm on the international stage, in several countries there

were large population groups who were dissatisfied with the world in
which they lived. Tradesmen, small businessmen, demobilised soldiers
and certain intellectuals found that the modern, capitalist and industrial-
ised society of the twentieth century did not give them enough room to
develop. Criticism of the industrial society was not a new phenomenon.
One only has to think of writers such as Maurice Barrès, Gaetano Mosca,
Vilfredo Pareto, Julius Langbehn and Friedrich Nietzsche, who, each in
their own way, had aired their grievances over the existing society even
before the First World War.
After the war, the dissatisfied were to unite mainly in two large and
related political movements, fascism and National Socialism. In March
1919, Benito Mussolini founded an organisation which can be considered
to be the precursor of the fascist movement, the Fasci Italiani di Combat-
timento, a “league of combat” consisting of veterans and former social-
ists. This group did not have its own ideology, but was centred around the
will for power and reaction against the existing social order. It was against
democracy as a form of government, against capitalism, against liberal-
ism, against communism, against internationalism and against pacifism.
In 1919, Mussolini declared emphatically that fascism was comprised of
actions. The people no longer needed ideologies, they needed action.
After fascism had gained power in Italy in 1922, however, in the per-
son of Mussolini, and the movement became institutionalised, an ideol-
ogy of sorts emerged nonetheless. That ideology consisted of a number
of elements. First of all, fascism advocated philosophical irrationalism: it
doubted reason, placed great trust in intuition and strongly believed in
myths such as that of the greatness of the Italian nation. It was therefore
not surprising that the book Psychologie des foules (1895), by the French
philosopher Gustave Le Bon, was popular among fascists and National
Socialists. Another characteristic of fascism was the idea that the individ-
ual derives his value from his existence within a state. The wishes of the
citizens were clearly subordinate to the interests of the state: nationalism
was of essential importance to the fascists. Fascism also assumed a funda-
mental inequality among humans, which meant for the purpose of gov-
ernment that a leader with superior insight had to lead the masses. Lastly,
fascism was the philosophy of terror and violence. According to Musso-
lini, fascism believed neither in the use nor the possibility of lasting peace.
Only war would ennoble the people and give the strongest their dues. An
almost automatic result of these concepts was an extremely aggressive for-

eign policy, aimed at building an empire.
The German version of fascism, National Socialism, added another two
elements. In the first place, National Socialism was explicitly not focused
on the nation state, but on people and race. According to the National So-
cialists, the world was populated by different races, and within the white
race various so-called Unterrassen could be distinguished. Reasoning
from a social Darwinist perspective, in Mein Kampf, Hitler came to the
conviction that the Germanic or Aryan race was to be considered as the
most gifted and most creative. The Aryan race “created culture” and as
such stood above races which “maintained culture” or “destroyed culture”.
According to Hitler, the culture-creating race should be refined to become
a racially pure Herrenvolk, while culture-destroying races such as that of
the Jews should be wiped off the face of the earth. The result of all this
was the concept of Lebensraum. The superiority of the German people
would lead to the annexation of surrounding states and the establishment
of a thousand-year Germanic empire. This was to be achieved by fighting,
which to the National Socialists meant the same as living, because after
all, man was a predator. Hitler once said: “We must shake off all sentimen-
tality and be hard. Some day, when I order war, I shall not be in a posi-
tion to hesitate because of the ten million young men I shall be sending to
their deaths.”5
National Socialists in power
When the world economy collapsed in 1929, Germany in particular was

in serious trouble. Foreign loans, essential to the German economy, were
revoked and factories had to close. Six million people lost their jobs, and
the middle class, which had never really recovered from the inflation of
1923, was again hit hard. As a result, few had any faith left in the demo-
cratic Weimar Republic, and political groups on the left and right of the
political spectrum gained in appeal. It was Adolf Hitler who managed to
strike the right note by strongly condemning the Treaty of Versailles as
the source of all the misery and criticising the democracy for its inability
to solve the people’s problems. He called on the German people to back
him. In 1930, Hitler’s party, the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiter
Partei (NSDAP) won 107 seats in the Reichstag, partly thanks to mob vio-
5 Quoted in: F.G. van der Poll, “Totalitaire stromingen” in: Fasen en facetten (Amster-
dam, 1962) 256.
A polling station in Berlin during the Reichstag elections on 5 March 1933, the last elections
to be held under the Weimar Republic.
Adolf Hitler during the Reichsparteitag of the NSDAP in Nuremberg in 1933.

lence perpetrated by its strong arm, the Sturmabteilung (SA). In 1928, the
NSDAP had only had 12 seats, and it had looked as though the phenom-
enon Hitler was of a passing nature. In July 1932, the Nazis won as many
as 230 seats, making them the largest political group in the country. In the
election in November of that year, however, the growth appeared to have
halted. The party lost two million votes and 34 seats.
Hitler was saved by the nationalist-conservative quarter. The tradi-
tional political leaders in those circles wanted Germany restored as a great
power and in Hitler they saw a useful instrument with which to channel
the general discontent in Germany. On 30 January 1933, at their instiga-
tion, ageing president von Hindenburg appointed Hitler Reichskanzler.
Adolf Hitler had come to power entirely legally, without ever having had
the backing of the majority of the German people.The new government’s
first act was to call new elections. Again, the NSDAP did not achieve a
majority, despite violence, unrest and the fire in the Reichstag building,
which was blamed on the communists. The party did win 44% of the
seats, however. The German parliament then put itself on the sidelines,
however, by passing the Enabling Act, allowing the government to take all
measures “to remedy the distress of the people and the nation”. Then all
political parties, except the NSDAP, were disbanded. In a very short space
of time, Germany had become a dictatorial one-party state.
From the very beginning, Hitler’s foreign policy was characterised by
numerous declarations emphasising Germany’s peaceful intentions. For
instance, Germany announced it was willing to disarm as long as it ob-
tained equal status in the international community. As early as 1933, how-
ever, Hitler decided to abandon the disarmament talks in Geneva and also
to leave the League of Nations, the first step towards a completely new for-
eign policy. Hitler largely removed the threat which emanated from these
measures by signing a non-aggression pact with Poland in 1934. Until
then, the German claims to Danzig and the Polish corridor had always
been considered to be the greatest threats to world peace. Now it seemed
as if Hitler, no matter how far-reaching his political aims, was considering
violence to be a useless instrument in foreign politics. In Germany in the
meantime, Hitler dealt with Ernst Röhm’s SA, as Röhm saw an important
role for his organisation in the army and posed a threat to Hitler’s posi-
tion. With this action on 30 June 1934, known as the ‘Night of the Long
Knives’, in which the leading figures of the SA met their deaths, Hitler was
able to win over the army leadership even further. This contributed to his
being able to assume and combine the posts of Reichspräsident and Reichs-
kanzler in August 1934.
24 chapter two
In the German state ruled by Hitler as Führer, the economy was made
to serve the preparations for war. The key figure in this respect was Hjal-
mar Schacht, who as Minister of Economic Affairs and president of the
Deutsche Bank was pumping considerable amounts of Deutschmarks
into the economy by funding public works, such as the construction of
the Autobahnen and an increase in arms production. The leadership of
the Wehrmacht, meanwhile, was happy with the new political direction,
which, after all, appeared to be facilitating German rearmament, even
though many officers had their reservations about the parvenu Hitler and
those close to him. Almost imperceptibly, however, the German army was
falling into the grasp of the National Socialists. The Luftwaffe for instance,
not established until the spring of 1935, was led by Hermann Göring, the
second man behind Hitler in the Nazi hierarchy, and the rapid growth of
the army allowed many young officers to make promotion quickly. Career
opportunities and development possibilities led to Hitler’s bid for power
being able to count on increasing support within the armed forces.
The image of a peaceful Germany, established after the German-Polish

non-aggression treaty, suffered serious damage from Hitler’s attempts to
stage a National Socialist coup in Vienna. This failed attempt at Anschluß
(1934) first of all led to France’s strengthening its ties with both Eastern
Europe and the Soviet Union and also set Mussolini’s Italy against Ger-
many. When Hitler officially announced German rearmament and the in-
troduction of conscription in March 1935, Italy, France and Britain even
united in the so-called Stresa Front. The three countries strongly con-
demned the German measures and announced their backing of Austrian
independence. Hitler had manoeuvred himself into an isolated position.
This situation soon came to an end, however. In June of the same year,
Britain and Germany signed a fleet treaty. Britain hoped to safeguard its
maritime superiority in Europe for the longer term, so that it could con-
centrate on the Far East. The fleet treaty meant the first crack in the Stresa
Front.
Not that the understanding between the three countries in the Stresa
Front was to hold out for very long anyway. After all, as early as 1935,
Mussolini decided that, now that Austria’s independence was safeguarded,
he no longer needed France and Britain. Anticipating the anger of Britain
in particular, he conquered Abyssinia, present-day Ethiopia. An outraged
British public demanded sanctions against Italy, but in practice there were
no more than diplomatic skirmishes.
Adolf Hitler takes the

salute in Nuremberg
in 1935.
The Stresa Front was no more and on 7 March 1936, Hitler made use
of this fact by remilitarising the Rhineland. This not only defied the Treaty
of Versailles, but also the Treaty of Locarno. The German Führer was play-
ing for high stakes. Should France have responded with military force,
then the German troops would immediately have retreated behind the
Rhine. France did not respond at all, however. Hitler’s gamble, against the
advice of his military advisers, paid off. A demilitarised Rhineland had
left the Ruhr area undefended and protected France against a German at-
tack. Now German troops were at the French border again and the Ruhr
industrial area now lay in the rear area. ‘Versailles’ had been revised for
good, Germany’s self-confidence had grown and Hitler had strengthened
his position with regard to the military.
26 chapter two
The German Lebensraum ambitions
After his success in the Rhineland, Hitler gradually obtained a better

grip on German military strategy, at the expense of the military leader-
ship. Hitler began to unfold plans for the deployment of the armed forces
for foreign conquests. These plans were a mix of the opportunistic inten-
tion of taking advantage of international crises and a grand ideological
panorama. On 5 November 1937, for instance, there was a secret meeting
between Hitler, his ministers of Foreign Affairs and War, Constantin von
Neurath and Werner von Blomberg, respectively, and the commanders-
in-chief of the army, air force and navy, Werner von Fritsch, Hermann
Göring and Erich Raeder. During that meeting, Hitler spoke of the ne-
cessity of acquiring Lebensraum for the German people. The future of the
Third Reich was at stake and from that point on, everything was to be
focused on conquering Eastern Europe, or bringing it under German in-
fluence, no later than between 1943 and 1945. That would be when Ger-
many’s military power was at its height.
First of all, Hitler announced, in preparation for further expansion,
Austria and Czechoslovakia would have to fall victim to the German hun-
ger for territory, by force if necessary. According to the Führer, a military
operation in Eastern Europe could also take place earlier than 1943, in the
event that France were to be beset by serious domestic social tensions, or
war were to break out in the Mediterranean between Britain and Italy.
Von Neurath, von Blomberg and von Fritsch had mainly practical objec-
tions to these plans of Hitler’s. They did not yet dare risk a pan-European
armed conflict. Power struggles, however, formed one of the key elements
of the National Socialist ideology. The critics were therefore replaced with-
in months. Hitler himself became commander-in-chief of the Wehrmacht,
Wilhelm Keitel was appointed Chief of the Oberkommando der Wehrmacht
(OKW), von Neurath was replaced by Joachim von Ribbentrop and von
Fritsch by Walther von Brauchitsch. They were not the only ones to be
put on the sidelines. After November 1937, some sixty generals were sent
into retirement and replaced by more docile figures, dedicated to National
Socialism. Hitler had decided that Germany would go into battle, and he
had no use for a critical military.
The first victim of Hitler’s expansionist dynamism was to be Austria,
the country where he was born on 20 April 1889 and which he had want-
ed to annex in 1934. In a meeting with the Austrian chancellor, Kurt von
Schuschnigg, on 4 February 1938, Hitler demanded that Nazis be included
in the Austrian government. Von Schuschnigg, however, saw through the
The Saar area was governed by the League of Nations for 15 years
from 1919. A referendum in 1935 showed that 90% of the population
favoured a return to the German Reich, after which
German troops entered the region.
“Peace for our time.” With this message, British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain returned
from Munich on 30 September 1938. His first declaration was made at Heston airfield.
28 chapter two
intentions of his aggressive neighbour and announced a referendum on

9 March, in which the Austrians would be asked whether they would fa-
vour an Anschluß. Two days later, Hitler demanded that the referendum be
postponed and when von Schuschnigg refused, he ordered the invasion of
Austria. The Western European powers only offered paper objections; Italy
declared it had no objections to the Anschluß. Austria was “heim ins Reich”.
After Austria, it was the turn of Czechoslovakia. Hitler wished to an-
nex those areas where the so-called Sudeten Germans lived. As these
areas were where the Czechoslovakian defences lay, such an operation
would also give Germany considerable influence in that country. From
the spring of 1938, an atmosphere of crisis continually surrounded the
Sudeten question. Britain, too, feared that war might ensue, despite the
fact that the Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain, referred to the Sudeten
question as “a quarrel in a faraway country between people of whom we
know nothing”. The Franco-Czechoslovakian alliance treaty of 1924, how-
ever, rendered the situation potentially explosive.
To what extent, then, were Britain and France willing and able to lend
Czechoslovakia military support, and how would they react to a German
attack in the west? British Prime Minister Chamberlain was an avowed
opponent of military involvement in any conflict on the Continent. Prior-
ity was to be given to the defence of the motherland, as well as the protec-
tion of British interests in the Middle East and the preservation of the Em-
pire. The Chiefs of Staff therefore urged Chamberlain to avoid conflict in
Europe at any cost: “without overlooking the assistance which we would
hope to obtain from France and possibly other allies, we cannot foresee
the time when our defence forces will be strong enough to safeguard our
trade, territory and vital interests against Germany, Italy and Japan at the
same time.”6 For the British government, there appeared to be only one
policy worth pursuing, namely the appeasement of Hitler.
France’s priority in the event of a European war was the defence of its
territory, and by no means the interests of countries such as Czechoslo-
vakia or Poland. In order to halt the Wehrmacht, France had constructed
an extensive line of defences along its borders with Germany and Lux-
embourg and its eastern border with Belgium, the Maginot Line. The line
stopped, however, at la Ferté-sur-Chiers, some 25 kilometres south-east of
Sedan as the crow flies, because the French high command considered the
Ardennes to be unsuitable for a surprise attack by heavy German mecha-
nised units. Moreover, in the event of a German attack, the French army
6 Quoted in: Michael Howard, The continental commitment. The dilemma of British de-
fence policy in the era of the two world wars (Harmondsworth, 1974) 120.
After the Munich conference, German troops entered Sudetenland unhindered.
The Germans’ entering Prague on 16 March 1939 convinced the British government that
the appeasement policy with regard to Germany had failed. London provided Poland and
Romania with a guarantee of security and began negotiations with the French government
on the deployment of a British expeditionary force to the Continent.
30 chapter two
leadership intended to establish a defensive front on Belgian territory,

west of the Ardennes.
Meanwhile, Hitler had demanded that Czechoslovakia cede Sudeten-
land to Germany, under threat of military intervention. Precisely at that
critical moment, Chamberlain decided to travel to Berchtesgaden in
southern Germany, where he had a meeting with Hitler on 15 September
1938. During these talks, the British Prime Minster said he did not ob-
ject to annexation of Sudetenland by Hitler, as long as the latter gave the
undertaking that there would be no military intervention by Germany.
Initially, the German Führer appeared to agree with the British proposal,
but on 22 September he announced that Czechoslovakia was to hand over
Sudetenland to Germany no later than 1 October. If it did not comply, war
would be the result. Europe appeared to be heading unavoidably towards
armed conflict when Mussolini proposed holding a conference on the is-
sues in Munich on 29 September.
The Munich conference was attended by the leaders of Germany, Italy,
France and Britain. The subject of the conference, Czechoslovakia, was
not invited. At the conference, the two leaders from democratic Western
Europe, Neville Chamberlain and Edouard Daladier, agreed to Hitler’s de-
mands. The despondent Czechoslovakians could do nothing except feel
betrayed and accept the ‘Munich’ decisions. Back in London, however,
Chamberlain received a hero’s welcome. He said he had achieved “peace
with honour”. “I believe it is peace for our time”, he added. Almost eve-
ryone agreed. General Edmund Ironside, then Inspector-General of the
Forces, wrote in his diary:
Chamberlain is of course right. We have not the means of defending our-
selves and he knows it... We cannot expose ourselves now to a German at-
tack. We simply commit suicide if we do.7
Chamberlain was later severely criticised for his appeasement policy, but
in view of the many difficulties he faced, his actions were understanda-
ble. Britain faced a great number of problems. At home there was an eco-
nomic crisis, severe unrest had erupted in Palestine and in British India
a strong nationalist movement had emerged, making reform there un-
avoidable. In addition, Japan was threatening British possessions in South
East Asia and Italy posed a threat to the sea route through the Suez Canal.
7 R. Macleod and D. Kelly, eds, The Ironside diaries (London, 1962) 62. On the position
of the British army during the interwar period and directly prior to the fight in 1940, see:
B. Bond, The army between the two world wars 1918-1939 and C. d’Este, The army and the
challenge of war 1939-1945 in: D. Chandler and I. Beckett, eds, The Oxford illustrated history
of the British army (Oxford and New York, 1994) 263-278 and 279-306.
Hitler enters Danzig triumphant on 19 September 1939.
After its ultimatum had remained unanswered, the British government declared war on the
German Reich on 3 September 1939. The photograph shows the proclamation being read on
the steps of the Royal Exchange.
32 chapter two
The British army would simply not be able to endure a large-scale Euro-
pean conflict on top of all that, and appeasement therefore seemed the only
way forward. Win time and strengthen the defence was the motto. Time
played an important role in Hitler’s considerations as well, however. He re-
alised that his policy of conquest might provoke France and Britain into re-
arming. In addition, the risk of a general European conflict was increasing.
Despite Germany’s advantage, like France and Britain it was not prepared
for such a conflict. It was therefore a matter of quickly achieving a series
of successes against smaller powers, but at the same time not jeopardising
peace in Europe as a whole. This scheme failed. Britain’s compliant attitude
changed when, on 16 March 1939, despite the Munich agreement, Hitler
invaded unoccupied Czechoslovakia and divided it into the Protectorate
of Bohemia and Moravia, and an independent Slovakia. The Führer had
definitely lifted his mask and the failure of the appeasement policy had be-
come manifest. Chamberlain now guaranteed the two Eastern European
states directly under German threat, Poland and Romania, that Britain
would provide military assistance if their sovereignty were threatened.
After the German invasion of Czechoslovakia, the French and British
military leadership also held extensive talks to discuss strategic policy and
London decided to send a British expeditionary force to the Continent.
They were convinced that no German attack on the strong Maginot Line
was to be expected and that a German advance through the Ardennes
would take so long that there would be enough time for countermeas-
ures. The Wehrmacht would therefore, as had been done in 1914, try to
invade via the relatively weakly defended northern border of France. It
was along this front, therefore, that the best French troops and the entire
British expeditionary force would be stationed. In response to a German
attack, the French and British troops would enter Belgium, which would
have become an ally as a result of the German invasion. The German as-
sault was to be halted by positions on Belgian territory and from there a
counteroffensive would be launched towards the Rhineland and the Ruhr
area. Without its arms industry, based in those areas, Germany would be
unable to continue the war.8 As yet, however, the allied troops would not
see action. Hitler was still looking eastwards.
8 For the main outline of the allied operational plans up to the commencement of hos-
tilities, see: K.H. Frieser, Blitzkrieg-Legende. Der Westfeldzug 1940 (München, 1995) 100-
110; R.A. Doughty, The breaking point. Sedan and the fall of France, 1940 (Hamden, 1990)
8-18; P. Taghon, Mei 1940. De achttiendaagse veldtocht in België (Tielt, 1989). ��
For a high-
ly detailed description, see B. Chaix, En Mai 1940, Fallait-il entrer en Belgique? Décisions
stratégiques et plans opérationnels de la campagne de France (Paris, 2000).
The east was, after all, where the main areas lay which Germany had
lost after the Treaty of Versailles: Danzig, the Polish Corridor and Sili-
cia. Hitler assumed that invading Poland would not provoke a military
response from the Western powers; after all, they had done nothing to
save strategically important Czechoslovakia either. When Germany sub-
sequently signed a non-aggression pact with the Soviet Union on 23 Au-
gust 1939, including a secret protocol dividing Poland between the two
countries, Hitler appeared to have a free rein. He therefore decided to go
on the warpath. After a staged ‘Polish’ attack on a German radio station in
Gleiwitz, the German battleship Schleswig-Holstein in the port of Danzig
opened fire on the Polish positions at a quarter to five on 1 September. At
around the same time, heavy German units crossed the Polish-German
border in various places. “This night for the first time Polish regular sol-
diers fired on our own territory”, roared Hitler in the Reichstag that very
same day. “Since 5: 45 a.m. we have been returning the fire, and from now
on bombs will be met with bombs!”9 The German Führer had plunged his
people, and with them the rest of Europe, into war. For six long years the
world was to remain in the grasp of the many horrors that ensued. The
Netherlands, too, was not to be spared the ravages of war.
Conclusion
What, then, went wrong during the interwar period? First of all, the First
World War and the Treaty of Versailles had not provided a definitive solu-
tion for the problems which had landed Europe in a large-scale military
conflict in 1914. The European balance of power, which had been upset
by the demographic, economic and military growth of Germany, had only
been restored artificially; Germany’s potential remained intact. With its
very strict conditions, the Treaty of Versailles had laid the basis for future
frustrations and rendered the democratic government of the Weimar Re-
public suspicious in the eyes of conservative Germans.
In the second place, the negative economic developments after 1914
had hit the social groups in Europe which should have formed the basis for
stable social development the hardest. In both Italy and Germany, but in
other countries as well, the middle classes became the victims of the high
9 “Speech by Herr Hitler to the Reichstag on September 1, 1939” in: The British War
Blue Book. Miscellaneous No. 9 (1939). Documents Concerning German-Polish Relations and
the Outbreak of Hostilities between Great Britain and Germany on September 3, 1939. Pub-
lished online by The Avalon Project: http://avalon.law.yale.edu/wwii/blbk106.asp
34 chapter two
inflation which came with the economic crises. Opportunistic politicians

would use the discontent among these groups in order to gain power.
Lastly, various developments in the interwar period, as well as the out-
come of the First World War and the bad economic situation, allowed a
number of radical right-wing movements to emerge. Once they came to
power, they would pose the greatest threat to peace. The fascist and Na-
tional Socialist ideologies were aggressive, aimed at conflict with a view
to seizing power and to expansion. This was to cause international politics
to lose all form of reason. It was up to the democracies of Europe to find
an adequate response. This set them an enormous task. Not only had the
international climate become grimmer, internally the governments of the
European democracies were also experiencing problems. The self-confi-
dence displayed by Germany and Italy and the way in which they tackled
the economic crisis raised the question as to whether democracy was still
the best and most effective form of government, and whether the future
did not lie with more authoritarian political systems. This crisis in democ-
racy was evident in the emergence of radical right-wing political parties,
even outside Germany and Italy, and in the emergence of democratic re-
form movements. It was in the midst of all these uncertainties that the
Netherlands had to find its way in the 1920s and 1930s. The Netherlands,
which had managed to stay well away from European power politics for
so long, was also to be confronted with the consequences of aggressive
German expansion.
CHAPTER THREE
BETWEEN HOPE AND FEAR: THE NETHERLANDS ARMED

FORCES IN THE INTERWAR PERIOD
Introduction
The defence policy pursued by the Netherlands in the 1920s and 1930s
is still considered by many Dutch people to be one of the main reasons
for the defeat in May 1940. After all, it is said, not only the poor level of
training and the inadequate armament of the Netherlands armed forces
were the cause of the defeat, but also, and especially, the policy of neutral-
ity. The political and military leadership had not properly interpreted the
signs of the times and therefore had failed to change course when there
was still time. As a consequence, the country was unnecessarily poorly
prepared when it began its trial of strength with the Third Reich.
It is questionable, however, whether such reproaches do justice to the
options that were open to the political and military leaders in the Nether-
lands. A correct assessment of the defence policy therefore first requires
an outline of its backgrounds and of the circumstances which faced the
leaders in question. This will particularly concern the connections, or lack
thereof, between three elements: the policy of neutrality, the military-stra-
tegic policy and the availability of assets with which the armed forces were
to perform their tasks.
The legacy of neutrality
The policy of neutrality, which was brought to an end by the German in-
vasion in 1940, had a history which went back an entire century. The basis
was laid in the 1840s, when, after the secession of Belgium, the Nether-
lands resigned itself to its role as a smaller power. The general opinion
was that the country’s security would be best served if the Netherlands
involved itself as little as possible in the differences between and aspira-
tions of the surrounding powers. In times of tension or outright conflict,
36 chapter three
Image from a
staff exercise in
the northern
provinces, 15
June 1932.
this policy of non-involvement took the form of neutrality. As long as the

Netherlands was not attacked, it would not side with any of the warring
parties and would take great care not to give offence to any power what-
soever.��
Should
��
the Netherlands be attacked nonetheless, then it would de-
fend its sovereignty by force of arms, with the aggressor’s opponents auto-
matically becoming allies. National defence was to have such a deterrent
effect that foreign powers would think better of attacking.
This was not the only basis for that deterrence, however. Political and
military leaders assumed that the great European powers would not allow
one another to conquer the Netherlands, as this would upset the balance
of power.��
This
��
meant that the Netherlands could always count on assis-
tance from allies.��
��
Aggression against the Netherlands would almost cer-
tainly plunge a foreign power into an armed conflict with the entire alli-
ance. This prospect, it was assumed, would act as a significant deterrent.
between hope and fear 37
Dutch security policy, therefore, was based on two main concepts: it

would benefit strongly from a stable balance of power in Europe, and the
neutrality was an armed neutrality.��
��
These concepts together formed the po-
litical basis for the military strategy in 1940. The Dutch historian H.W. von
der Dunk referred to this basis as ‘pseudoneutralism’, as there was a con-
siderable paradox between the non-involvement and neutrality on the one
hand, and on the other hand the firm conviction that military defeat would
eventually be prevented by one of the great powers.1 The political and mili-
tary debates on the precise nature and size of the armed forces that would
suit this strategy have therefore always been faced with the problem that it
was not possible to determine unequivocally what degree of defence effort
was required and sufficient. All that was certain was that, as a small power
surrounded by three great ones, Germany, France and Britain, the Neth-
erlands would never be able to maintain a defence strong enough to de-
fend itself alone against an invasion by one of those three countries.2 That,
1 For the Dutch strategic policy in the second half of the nineteenth century, and the
early decades of the twentieth century, see: W. Bevaart, De Nederlandse defensie (1839-
1874) (The Hague, 1993); W. Klinkert, Het vaderland verdedigd. Plannen en opvattingen
omtrent de verdediging van Nederland 1874-1914 (The Hague, 1992); R.P.F. Bijkerk, “Ne-
derlands defensiebeleid in de jaren ’20. Het bestaande beeld nader bezien”, Militaire Specta-
tor, CLXIV (1995) 90-96; R.P.F. Bijkerk, “Actueel militair verleden?”, Maatschappij en Krijgs-
macht, XVII (1995-december) 19-24; R.P.F. Bijkerk, “W.F. Pop (1858-1931)” in: G. Teitler
and W. Klinkert, eds, Kopstukken uit de krijgsmacht. Nederlandse vlag- en opperofficieren
1815-1955 (Amsterdam, 1997) 282-299 and R. van Diepen, Voor Volkenbond en vrede. Ne-
derland en het streven naar een nieuwe wereldorde 1919-1946 (Amsterdam, 1999), passim.
For the designation of Dutch security policy as ‘pseudoneutralism’, see: H.W. von der Dunk,
“Neutralisme en defensie: het dilemma in de jaren dertig” in: G. Teitler, ed., Tussen crisis en
oorlog. Maatschappij en krijgsmacht in de jaren ’30 (Dieren, 1984) 21. For the altered strate-
gic situation of the Netherlands in the First World War and the contacts with the surround-
ing powers, see: T. van Gent, Het falen van de Nederlandse gewapende neutraliteit, september
1939-mei 1940 (Amsterdam, 2009). For the strategic planning within the General Staff, also
see: H. Amersfoort, Een harmonisch leger voor Nederland.��
Oorlogsbeeld,
��
strategie en opera-
tionele planning van het Nederlandse leger in het Interbellum (Breda, 2007).
2 The Netherlands was in a similar position to that of neighbouring Belgium, as was
noted by other countries. Even before the First World War, the great French teacher and
military thinker Ferdinand Foch wrote in his authoritative Des principes de la guerre (which
was first published in 1903): “The situation of Belgium is known to you: a neutrality guar-
anteed by Europe, which is perhaps nothing more than a word, but has, in any case, hith-
erto guaranteed the existence of that little State; further, the immediate neighbourhood of
two great Powers, Germany and France, from neither of which does any serious military
obstacle separate that State, by either of which it might be easily conquered if the other
neighbour, or Europe as a whole, did not intervene in the struggle. [For the Belgian Army,
it would be a matter of developing a specific theory of war which] would have a well-
determined object, namely that of delaying as much as possible the advance of the invading
neighbour. The study would then consist in finding out how the Belgian Army can perform
such a part, by avoiding the decision by arms and adjourning the judgment of battle.” See:
Marshal Foch, The Principles of War (London, 1921) 22-23.
38 chapter three
however, was a negative point of departure. There was no positive point

of departure on which military planning could have been based. On the
one hand, the armed forces had to be strong enough to form a deterrent.
On the other hand, in view of the expected allied support, they were not
required to be able to defend the country entirely by themselves. Should
the deterrence fail, then the Dutch armed forces only had to be able to
safeguard national sovereignty and part of Dutch territory long enough to
give the allies time to come to their assistance. The objective of the military
strategy was derived from the same principle. It was realistic, but hardly
ambitious: gaining time.
To achieve that objective, the Netherlands relied heavily on fortifica-
tions and defence lines.��
The
��
1874 Fortifications Act concentrated the de-
fence, even more so than before, on the area bordered by the coast, the
Amsterdam area, the New Dutch Waterline and a southern front along
the major rivers.��
This
��
area, which was soon to be known as Fortress Hol-
land, provided good opportunities for a sustained defence and made an
enemy invasion an unattractive prospect. As early as the 1840s, however,
there were also those who said that part of the army should be kept mo-
bile, rather than being tied to prepared positions and lines. King William
II (1840-49) in particular was an advocate of this point of view. These
troops, of which some were preferably to be activated in peacetime, would
be able to operate as a forward defence in the free space outside the lines,
particularly in the Achterhoek and Noord-Brabant.��
In
��
the nineteenth cen-
tury, these plans were never implemented, but troops were earmarked to
delay the enemy advance in the area between the border and the major
defence lines, by means of demolition and harassment operations, allow-
ing the mobilisation in the rear area to continue undisturbed. If they were
to get into difficulties, they could then retreat behind friendly lines.
Military developments abroad and a changing threat perception
opened new prospects for the mobile troops. In the second half of the
nineteenth century, the great powers began to attach greater importance
to mobile warfare in their doctrines.��
��
Future armed conflicts would no lon-
ger be centred on fortresses, but move into the open field. From now on,
warfare meant manoeuvring with armies and forcing quick conclusions
by means of large-scale battles.��
��
In this doctrine, which was embraced par-
ticularly in Germany and France, the offensive operation developed into
the ideal of the art of warfare.
For the Dutch strategists, this military trend represented both a threat
and a challenge. The threat lay in what was generally referred to as the
‘strategic raid’. This would mean that a neighbouring power, without the
slightest warning or a declaration of war, would, as it were, overrun the

country directly from the barracks, and occupy it, before the Dutch army
had had the chance to mobilise. As has already been mentioned, it was
one of the tasks of the mobile troops to avert this danger.��
The
��
opportuni-
ties lay in following the example of the great powers.
From the turn of the century, the General Staff had ceased to regard
one of the surrounding powers attempting to conquer the entire country
as a possibility. Instead, there was the fear that Germany, France or Britain
would make use of Dutch territory for their operations in the event of a
large-scale conflict. This could be in Limburg, Noord-Brabant or possibly
Zeeland. The staunch defence of Fortress Holland would no longer suffice
against this threat. If the Netherlands was to be able to act in response to
such gross violations of its territory, far from Fortress Holland, it would
need to have powerful, mobile troops at its disposal. At the end of the
nineteenth century, the term ‘field army’ began to appear increasingly in
the debates on the tasks of the Dutch army. Supporters of the idea were of
the opinion that the army organisation should have a permanent place for
a strong force which was suitable for mounting a mobile defence outside
Fortress Holland. This field army would have to be so well trained and
equipped that it would be able to strike across long distances from a cen-
trally located concentration area, and be able to switch from one theatre
of operations to another, depending on the movements of the enemy. In
this view, conscription legislation would have to be reviewed so that the
conscripts were on active service long enough to be trained in the difficult
mobile warfare.��
All
��
these measures were to harmonise the army organisa-
tion, the conscription system and the contributions of the fortifications
system and the field army to the national defence.
The advocates of the field army partly had their way at the beginning
of the twentieth century.��
��
This was possible because in the 1898-1913 pe-
riod, the lengthy stalemate in the modernisation of the army organisa-
tion and the army formation system, which was still based on the 1861
Militia Act, was broken. Various ministers of war contributed, but it was
Hendrikus Colijn who eventually gave shape to the system in 1911-1913.
Personal conscription was introduced in 1898, and the annual contingent
was increased from 17,500 men to 23,000. The duration of the conscrip-
tion was five years, but in the infantry, which was the main arm, the ini-
tial term of service was shortened from twelve months to eight-and-a-
half. The schutterijen, municipal militias, were no longer of any value to
modern combat and were therefore disbanded and replaced by the home
guard. Every year, the senior draft of the militia was transferred to the
40 chapter three
home guard (landweer) and after another five years to the home reserve
(landstorm). The home reserve comprised all ex-militiamen and ex-home
guard conscripts, as well as all those who were exempted from the militia.
There were more conscripts available each year than the 23,000 who were
called up on active service. Due to these measures, the Netherlands now
had a trained and mobilisable army (the activated, most recent draft of
the militia plus the militia and home guard drafts which could be called
up) of around 207,000 men. In the shape of the home reserve, there was
a 160,000-strong, albeit only partially trained, army reserve, to replace
combat losses and for rotation purposes. The home reserve also meant
that the Netherlands now not only had personal conscription, but general
conscription as well.
There were sufficient numbers of trained soldiers to be able to make a
distinction, even in peacetime, between fortification troops and units for
the field army, so that the peacetime and war establishments were better
aligned. In 1905, a fourth division was added to the field army. Almost
half of the mobilisable strength was now earmarked for the field army. The
command structure was improved with the introduction of the brigade
level: three brigades per division, each with three regiments. The same
was achieved with the establishment of a permanent field army headquar-
ters in 1907, which also operated in peacetime. All staffs from brigade
level upwards were now already in place in peacetime, so that this aspect
of the transition from peace to war would run more smoothly as well. The
operational possibilities of the field army were assessed from 1910, during
strategic map exercises at the General Staff. The following year, the first
of a series of field exercises took place, with entire divisions taking part
simultaneously and simulating mobile warfare to the best possible degree.
Many people were of the opinion that the favourable course of the
First World War for the Netherlands was proof that the decisions made
in the preceding years had been correct. It was said that the expansion
of the armed forces, the improvements in the organisation and especially
the manoeuvre capability of the field army, which had been concentrated
south of the major rivers in 1914-1918, together had formed a deterrent
which had saved the Netherlands from the carnage.3 These opinions were
based on the pre-war improvements in the army and testified to a well-
developed national self-confidence. On the other hand, they obscured the
fact that the great powers, particularly the German Empire, had respected
Dutch neutrality for reasons of self-interest.
3 Cf. H.P. van Tuyll van Serooskerken, The Netherlands and World War I. Espionage,
diplomacy and survival (Leiden, 2001).
After the First World War
The Netherlands had not been involved in the First World War, but the
sense of relief in that respect soon gave way to discord and a feeling of dis-
orientation. The reason for this was the fact that the end of the Great War
had shaken Dutch security policy to its very foundations: the balance of
power in Europe had been upset drastically and the options for a credible
policy of armed neutrality had decreased considerably.
The Treaty of Versailles ruled out Germany as a great power, while the
British cabinet, so soon after the bloody battle in northern France, was
extremely hesitant towards subsequent continental commitment. In this
situation, France had a free rein to subdue Germany with power politics
and to dominate the continent. Minister of Foreign Affairs Herman van
Karnebeek, and with him the mainstream of Dutch politics, understood
that the Netherlands had lost its role as baron de balance for the time be-
ing. In the 1920s, therefore, they considered it necessary and inevitable
that Germany would eventually resume it natural place as a great power.
The means to that end was a peaceful revision of the Treaty of Versailles.
As a small, non-involved power, however, the Netherlands had little op-
portunity to effect this independently, and would have to wait and see
whether London, which had the same goal in mind, was successful. When
from 1933 onwards, Germany began, less and less peacefully, to rid itself
of the restrictions of Versailles, the successive Colijn governments hoped
that Germany, after it had settled its grievances, would decide not to go to
war and return to being a normal power in a restored balance of power.
Meanwhile, the armed forces could be reinforced, to support the policy
of armed neutrality. Colijn personally was worried in particular about the
Japanese aspirations in the Far East. In the 1920s and 1930s, he was one
of the key politicians in the Netherlands.��
��
A member of one of the Protes-
tant political parties, he led five governments and held various ministerial
posts. Prior to his political career, from 1892 to 1909 he fought in Aceh as
an officer in the Royal Netherlands East Indies Army, receiving the high-
est honour for bravery, the Military Order of William. From 1914 to 1922
he was a member of the board of directors of the Bataafsche Petroleum
Maatschappij, the oil company developing the large oilfields in Sumatra.
This background explains why, as a politician, Colijn continued to have a
specific interest in the Netherlands East Indies. The sometimes open but
usually tacit orientation towards the British continental policy of a bal-
ance of power in the 1920s and appeasement in the 1930s was the contin-
42 chapter three
uation of a nineteenth-century trend, and tied in well with the common

interests in the Far East.4
The League of Nations could offer no alternative. The cabinet did not
believe that the establishment of the League had changed the principle
that international relations were all about power struggles.��
��
Collective se-
curity, arbitration and international law would only have any significance
after a stable balance of power had been restored.��
Moreover,
��
collective se-
curity, which meant that all members of the League of Nations would act
as one against any country which disturbed world peace, was at odds with
the policy of neutrality. The Hague therefore had great doubts regarding
Article 16 of the Covenant of the League of Nations, which governed the
composition of an armed force that would bring any aggressor into line
on behalf of the League of Nations, as well as the right of League of Na-
tions troops to passage through other members’ territory, and the impos-
ing of economic and financial sanctions.5 From 1934, the Netherlands
stated several times, with increasing emphasis, that it would decide on a
case-by-case basis whether it would participate in certain sanctions.��
A
��
fi-
nal argument against the League of Nations was that the countries which
had emerged victorious from the First World War, and France especially,
dominated the organisation.
The fact that the Netherlands nonetheless joined the League of Nations
in 1920 stemmed from the fear that it would otherwise end up being iso-
lated in the international community.��
In
��
addition, people had not yet re-
covered from the shock of the First World War. Any means which could
contribute to the prevention of a repeat of such an orgy of military vio-
lence and international anarchy was welcome. In that respect, the League
of Nations appealed to the imaginations of many and represented hope
for a better future, a future of “a peaceful world order, based on princi-
ples such as respect for international law, the scaling down of armaments,
peaceful resolution of disputes and economic cooperation.”6
The task facing the cabinets of the 1920s and 1930s was not an easy
one. The government’s financial position had deteriorated as a result of
the war.��
The
��
underlying factor was the high defence expenditure as a re-
sult of mobilisation and the various crisis measures that had been neces-
sary to save the country from major disruption. The anticipated post-war
recovery failed to materialise. From 1920 to 1927, the Dutch economy was
4 H. Langeveld, Schipper naast God. Hendrikus Colijn 1869-1944. Deel Twee 1933-1944
(Amsterdam, 2004) 339-381, 479-487.
5 G. van Roon, Kleine landen in crisistijd. Van Oslostaten tot Benelux, 1930-1940 (Am-
sterdam and Brussels, 1985) 58.
6 Van Diepen, Voor Volkenbond en vrede, 287.
In February 1936, more money was made available for defence,
when Parliament approved the establishment of the Defence Fund.
Cartoon by L.J. Jordaan in the Groene Amsterdammer of 22 February 1936.
Consultations in Hotel Wientjes in Zwolle during manoeuvres which took place in Gelderland
and Overijssel from 20 to 24 September 1937. Second from the left is the Commander of the
Field Army, Lieutenant General baron van Voorst tot Voorst. Opposite him, leaning forward,
is Captain V.E. Nierstrasz and on the far right is Lieutenant A.H.J.L. Fiévez.
44 chapter three
in recession, not least as a result of the collapse of the German market,

which was so important to the Netherlands. This was precisely at a time
when the equal treatment of private and state schools and the expansion
of social legislation were leading to extra expenditure.��
��
These circum-
stances forced the centre-right coalition parties to cut back on other parts
of the state budget.��
��
These cutbacks particularly hit national defence.��
��
Af-
ter all, the favourable international situation appeared to allow room for
these cutbacks. In the 1920s there was no threat of war.
After Hitler gained power in 1933, and thunderclouds gathered over the
international skies, however, the Netherlands began to grow concerned. In
her speech at the official opening of Parliament in 1934, Queen Wilhelmina
said:
It must be concluded, with grave concern for the future of mankind, that al-
most everywhere the tendency towards strong armament has been revived. The
Government will do whatever lies in its power to contribute to putting a curb
on that tendency.��
��
It is, however, also obliged to take this phenomenon into ac-
count in the implementation of its plans with regard to national defence.7
It was to be some years, however, before this concern manifested itself in

defence policy. The worldwide economic crisis which began in 1929, and
the financial and economic policy pursued by Colijn, stood in the way of
an increase in defence expenditure for some years.
By now, a change began to occur among the supporters of unilateral
disarmament as well. After 1918, the Liberal Democratic Union (VDB)
and the Social Democratic Workers’ Party (SDAP), two parties which did
not bear the responsibility of government, had proved staunch supporters
of increasingly drastic cutbacks on defence and these parties had adopted
the emblem of the ‘broken rifle’.��
��
In 1936, under pressure from the devel-
opments in Europe, the VDB officially abandoned its pro-disarmament
position. The SDAP followed suit a year later, with leaders such as Koos
Vorrink, who was a captain in the Amsterdam civic guard in 1940, and
H.B. Wiardi Beckman, who was a reserve lieutenant at General Head-
quarters, giving voice to the changing opinions.
The cupboard is bare—from 1922 to 1933
The other foundation of security policy, that of armed neutrality, also be-
came considerably less firm in the 1920s and 1930s. After the First World
7 E. van Raalte, ed., Troonredes, openingsredes, inhuldigingsredes 1814-1963 (The Hague,

1964) 249-250.
War, the Netherlands was faced with the task of ensuring that its army
kept abreast of the military developments of the great powers. Warfare
had undergone a great many changes during the Great War, as well as a
huge increase in scale.��
These
��
new developments, such as the tactical con-
sequences of the use of machine guns, infantry field guns, heavy field ar-
tillery, poison gases, aircraft and the tank, had largely passed the Nether-
lands by. It was not immediately evident how these developments would
fit into the limited Dutch framework. Nor was it easy to make decisions in
this respect with regard to army strength and organisation.The challenge
was to design an army system which was less expensive in peacetime than
that of before 1914, and as a result of which the burden of conscription
on the population was as light as possible. Nonetheless, in wartime the
system would have to produce an army which followed the trend of scale
increase in warfare. It was with this basis that the Ruys de Beerenbrouck
government, which took office on 9 September 1918, went to work. The
army plan drawn up by the Minister of War, G.A.A. Alting von Geusau,
changed hardly a single aspect of Colijn’s pre-war system.��
��
His only con-
cession was to shorten the duration of the initial term of service for con-
scripts. Alting von Geusau considered this to be justifiable because as yet
there was no significant war threat. In addition, due to the fact that the
home reserve had been called up during the mobilisation of 1914-1918,
the Netherlands now had 450,000 trained soldiers.
Parliament, however, was not satisfied and demanded more cutbacks.
Alting von Geusau chose the honourable option and resigned in early
January 1920. His successor, W.F. Pop, knew how difficult his task was go-
ing to be. He had been acting Commander-in-Chief since 11 November
1918 and Chief of the General Staff since 15 November 1919, and in those
capacities he had participated in the civil-service consultations on army
reform and had been involved in the extensive discussions with senior
civil servants, the rest of the army leadership and the government parlia-
mentary parties after Alting von Geusau’s resignation. These consultations
had begun with an internal memorandum, which Member of Parliament
and former Minister of War H. Colijn had written at the request of C.J.M.
Ruys de Beerenbrouck, the Prime Minister. In the spring of 1921, Pop
presented his Bill for a new Militia Act. He maintained the contingent of
23,000 men. Of that number, 15,000 were intended for the main arm, the
infantry, and they could be considered fully trained after six months. They
were to form the core of the army. The remaining 8,000 would only be
partially trained and those who had done voluntary training prior to call-
up would spend even less time in the barracks, if any at all. Pop wanted
46 chapter three
to form a field army from the most recent draft of fully trained soldiers,
to comprise 36 infantry battalions, half of the pre-war field army number.
This reduction was compensated by doubling the strength of the artillery:
two regiments of field artillery instead of one for each of the four divisions
of the field army.
Pop’s opting for a small, and therefore affordable, yet well-equipped
army was partly in accordance with the conclusions which the French
army had drawn from the First World War. In the French opinion, in the
next war the artillery would be the second main arm, cooperating with
the infantry.��
Overwhelming
��
firepower would decide the battle “by wear-
ing down the opponent”. The French 1921 combat manual referred to
firepower, rather than manoeuvre, as “the main element of combat” and
defined the attack as “the fire that advances” and the defence as “the fire
that stops”. Only behind walls of fire would the infantry be able to move
across the battlefield.��
��
Pop was unable, however, to follow another gener-
ally accepted conclusion from 1914-1918, namely that the next war would
be all about massiveness and stamina. Parliament’s desire to cut back on
defence and to have the burden of conscription be as light as possible pre-
vented it. Pop’s solution of a small moderately trained field army, with a
large reserve still to be trained, did not tie in with the view that a small
power should have considerable military capability in the early stages of
a conflict in order to have any chance of success against the armed forces
of a great power. Large reserves would be of no significance if the armed
forces were destroyed in the first battle.
When he realised in July 1921 that his proposal stood no chance in
Parliament, and it became clear that the cabinet did not want to resign
over the matter, Pop resigned. His successor, J.J.C. van Dijk, had to find
another way out of the same paradox of requirements as his predeces-
sors had been faced with.��
��
Unlike his predecessors, Van Dijk was to suc-
ceed in designing an army system which was politically acceptable and
also met the minimum requirements on the military side. Van Dijk let go
of Pop’s distinction between the core army and the largely untrained re-
serve. He reverted to the pre-war large ‘single army’, but that meant he
could not avoid making greater concessions with regard to the size of the
contingent, the duration of the initial term of service and a more limited
strengthening of the artillery. It was with this army system, based on Van
Dijk’s law of 4 February 1922 “comprising a new regulation of conscrip-
tion”, that the Netherlands would enter into the confrontation with the
German Wehrmacht in 1940.
The 1922 law allowed a mobilisable army of around 250,000 men to be

formed. This would bring the field army back to its pre-war strength of 72
infantry battalions. Due to a later amendment to the law, the total army
strength was increased, comprising at least 280,000 men in May 1940.8
This strength was built up out of a large number of relatively small annual
drafts, namely fifteen drafts to fill the war establishment, with another five
drafts from the oldest trained drafts to form a reserve. Van Dijk achieved
this by disbanding the home guard and the home reserve and merging
them with the militia. A maximum of 19,500 conscripts would be called
up for active service each year.��
The
��
advantage was that the burden of con-
scription on the population was kept to a minimum, because many young
men did not need to be called up and therefore were declared extraordi-
nary conscripts. Moreover, a relatively small draft was less expensive than
a large one, as it required fewer instructors and a smaller infrastructure.
There were, nonetheless, a number of objections to this system. Many
men were not called up for national service, resulting in a certain social
inequality. In addition, it would become apparent that in 1939 a great
many husbands and fathers were mobilised, but many unmarried young
men escaped mobilisation. Purely from a military point of view, it would
have been better to opt for a smaller number of larger annual drafts. The
advantages would have been the fact that the army which was mobilised
would have been “younger” and therefore more flexible, and that a larger
part of the population would have been familiar with the military organi-
sation.��
��
In the circumstances of the 1920s, however, the possibility to re-
duce “the personal and financial burden of military service” was decisive.9
Attempts were made, however, to remove the objections by, if possible,
concentrating the older drafts of conscripts in certain corps which were
not intended for the front line, the so-called high-numbered regiments.
The law also prescribed the duration of the initial term of service. Since
1901, it had been twelve months for some conscripts and eight-and-a-half
for others. The Covenant of the League of Nations determined that if two
countries wished to settle a dispute by force of arms, they would have to
wait for a period of three months after an arbitral decision before open-
ing hostilities. Van Dijk saw this as an argument in favour of shortening
the initial term of service by three months.10 For a number of arms and
8 A.J. Groustra and P.W. Oesterhoff, De dienstplichtwet voorzien van aanteekeningen

(Alphen aan den Rijn, 1922) 31 and F. Snapper, “Enige sterktecijfers betreffende de Ne-
derlandse landmacht in de periode 1840-1940”, Mededelingen Sectie Militaire Geschiedenis
Landmachtstaf, IV (1981) 91.
9 Queen’s Speech of 21 September 1920, in: Van Raalte, Troonredes, 227.
J.J. de Wolf, Mars in Cathedra 1865-1965 (The Hague, 1965) 67.
10 ��
��
48 chapter three
branches, including the infantry, it was reduced to just five-and-a-half

months. The conscripted officers and NCOs, the mounted artillery and
cavalry, and certain categories of soldiers with specialist jobs served lon-
ger, up to a maximum of eighteen months. Incidentally, it was possible to
shorten the initial term of service by four months by means of the ‘pre-
liminary exercise’, that is for the soldiers who were assigned to an arm
or corps to which this rule applied. This preliminary exercise took place
on a voluntary basis, in the soldiers’ own free time, in order to alleviate
the burden of conscription and to save money. The preliminary exercise
proved not to work well as part of the training system, however, and the
costs turned out to be higher than expected as well.��
��
It was therefore dis-
continued in 1936.
The short duration of the initial term of service was a concession to the
wishes of society. Military experts thought it was too short, but as long as
the time was put to good use, in their opinion it would still be possible to
teach the conscripts elementary military skills. To that end, they were to
spend the first and last six weeks of their initial term of service at camps
in Ede and Nieuw-Milligen for intensive training in the field. In practice,
however, this did not materialise.
As regards the refresher training exercises, the law stated that their
maximum duration was to be 40 days, generally divided over two periods,
and that they were to take place within six years of the year of the initial
term of service.��
��
That meant that there were no more refresher training ex-
ercises after the sixth year. The level of training of the older drafts dropped
considerably. When various refresher training exercises were shortened,
or even cancelled completely, as a result of cutbacks, it meant yet another
weakening of the level of training.
The 1922 Conscription Act separated the peacetime establishment
from the wartime establishment. Unlike the situation before 1914, when
mobilisation meant bringing the standing units up to war strength, those
units would now be formed from scratch in the event of mobilisation. A
major disadvantage was that they would be lacking in cohesion, which
had an adverse effect on the combat power. As the army consisted entirely
of training units in peacetime, there were no combat-ready troops pres-
ent. The system also made it very difficult to exercise with large units. The
result of all this was a shortage of experienced commanders in the war-
time army, which was to become clearly apparent in 1940.
From 1922 onwards, another reorganisation was undertaken. Various
measures were taken to improve the flexibility of the army and its com-
mand and control.��
For
��
instance, Fortress Holland Command was es-
Prince Bernhard inspecting the First Armoured Vehicle Squadron in 1936.
The squadron was equipped with the Landsverk M-36 armoured vehicle.
The car workshop of the engineers, 1939.

50 chapter three
tablished in 1922. In addition, the Field Army now comprised four divi-
sion groups (called corps from 1 July 1939) of two divisions each, while
the manoeuvre element of the Field Army was increased in 1924 with the
establishment of the Light Brigade. Attempts were also made to improve
the armament. For instance, in 1922, Van Dijk launched a proposal for
an Armament Fund. The fund, which was to contain some 105 million
guilders, eventually did not materialise, however.��
��
Subsequently, the deci-
sion was made to spend 60 million guilders in the 1925-1931 period on
improvements to the army, but this did not happen either. In those years,
there was only one-and-a-half million guilders available every year for ar-
mament. Nonetheless, the Ministry managed to order 10-Veld field guns
in 1927. The M20 light machine-gun and the Stokes-Brandt mortar were
also introduced. The limited financial resources exacted a great deal of the
army’s ability to improvise. For instance, the 8-Staal guns, which had been
deemed outdated and allocated to the gun reserve, were upgraded in 1927.
A year earlier, the 7-Veld field guns had been modified. Further proposals
by the Chief of the General Staff, Lieutenant General P.J.H. van der Palm,
for additions to the armament and equipment were rejected in 1927.
In 1928, the 1922 Conscription Act was amended, separating the con-
scription from the draft year. That meant that the conscripted officers and
NCOs could be called up before the rank and file. This did not change
the number of men available for conscription, however. The 1922 law had
made its mark on the developments, because it had established the nu-
merical strength and the peacetime and wartime establishments. In this
context, Lieutenant General H.A. Seyffardt, who had succeeded Van der
Palm as Chief of the General Staff in May 1929, remarked:
In 1922, the wartime organisations were established on the basis of the most
recently quoted strength. At the time, however, it was not possible to take
into account all factors to which modern wartime organisations must con-
form. In addition, in later years new organisations were established, the
personnel requirements of which could not have been taken into account
in 1922. Various staffs had to be expanded, the anti-aircraft artillery, the
searchlight battalions for the air defence and the motorcycle service in par-
ticular set higher personnel requirements than had initially been expected;
new machine-gun organisations were established and existing ones were ex-
panded; the organisation for the division group artillery, the infantry guns,
the pioneer and pontoon battalion of the Light Brigade, and the company of
the transportation corps etc. were established.11
11 ��
Report
��
of the Chief of the General Staff, 14 May 1930, in: Archief van het Kabinet
der Koningin, The Hague, Litt. Z.G., no. 42.
In the 1920s the Netherlands endeavoured, with the measures referred to

by Seyffardt, to maintain an army which would remain a modest reflec-
tion of the armies of the great powers, on a scale befitting a small power.
The problem was that this had to be done within the confines of the avail-
able budget, more specifically within the scope of the 1922 Conscription
Act, which fixed the strength of the army at a maximum of 250,000 men.
The result was that the continuing modernisation of the army systemati-
cally came at the cost of the traditional combat power, namely that of the
infantry.
The army that resulted from the 1922 army system was supposed to
carry out the operation plans of the General Staff. In view of the policy
of neutrality, that staff had to take a various number of war scenarios into
account. A detailed defence plan was prepared for each of those scenarios.
The Field Army would take up a certain position, referred to as a concen-
tration, depending on the situation. In 1925, five such concentrations had
been prepared:12
a. a concentration near the Wilhelmina Canal, in the event of a conflict

with a power to the south;
b. a concentration in eastern Noord-Brabant, in order to take action
against a passage through southern Limburg;
c. a concentration at the river IJssel, in the event of a conflict with an
eastern neighbour;
d. a concentration behind the New Dutch Waterline;
e. a concentration on the coast and in Zeeland.
From 1928, the staff gave these various concentration plans for the Field
Army colours, with Concentration Blue applying to an attack by Germa-
ny, scenario c.
Despite the disarmament of Germany, in the 1920s the General Staff
continued to bear in mind the possibility that the Netherlands could be de-
feated quickly, if its eastern neighbour were to acquire a strong army again.
After all, the Netherlands had no combat-ready troops at its disposal. In
order to solve this problem (referred to as a ‘strategic raid’), the Conscrip-
tion Act included a stipulation that in the event of heightened tension, cer-
tain categories of conscripts would be called up, to safeguard the general
mobilisation. From 1926, this was referred to as ‘strategic precautions’.
12 ��
��
C.M. Schulten, “Van neutralisme naar bondgenootschap; de mobilisaties in 1870,
1914 en 1939” in: C.A. Kuyt, ed., Nederland mobiliseert (The Hague, 1985).
52 chapter three
In 1931, the Welter Commission was established, which was tasked

with making proposals for decreases in government expenditure, in view
of the poor economic situation. Contrary to what was assumed later, the
sole purpose of the commission was not to cut back on defence expen-
diture. Its establishment was, in fact, a turning point in the long series
of cutbacks in the defence budget. The commission’s report showed that,
with the existing organisation, there were scarcely any possibilities left to
reduce the national defence. The only significant cutback for defence was
on the salaries, which applied to all government employees.��
Other
��
minis-
tries, such as Education, Water Management, and Labour, Trade & Indus-
try had to endure further reductions.
It is often thought that the state of the army during a large part of the
interwar period was the result of the position held by the left-wing par-
ties, whose watchword was “Not a single man and not a single cent for
militarism”. This was only partly true. The social-democrats (SDAP) and
the progressive liberals (VDB) did not govern for the greater part of those
years. The Christian-democrats, who held a key position in politics and
formed the successive cabinets, always supported the cutbacks on defence.
The cabinet held the view that expenditure for the army could be limited
to the bare necessities, as long as the Netherlands’ neutrality and sover-
eignty were not compromised.13 It must be noted, however, that there
were no signs of increased tension in international relations at the time.
Turning point
In 1933, the Netherlands was still in a depression.��

��
The country was suffer-
ing under the poor economic climate and a high unemployment rate. In
military circles, the realisation grew that the formation and organisation
of the army, developed in 1922, had not led to the desired result due to the
cutbacks. In September 1933, the cabinet established a commission which
was to design an organisation for the army both in the Netherlands and in
the Netherlands East Indies, which would save 20 to 30 million guilders
in defence expenditure. This commission, chaired by A.W.F. Idenburg,
considered reductions in the wartime establishment to be unjustifiable,
however, and only saw possibilities for saving money on the peacetime es-
tablishment. Not until the autumn of 1935 were these proposals for the
13 ��
��
For the viewpoints of the political parties, see: J.A.M.M. Janssen, “Kerk, coalitie en
defensie in het Interbellum” in: G. Teitler, ed., Tussen crisis en oorlog. Maatschappij en krijgs-
macht in de jaren ’30 (Dieren, 1984) 42-62.
Exercise with searchlights at the Kromhout Barracks in Utrecht, 16 April 1939.
Queen Wilhelmina visiting units of the First Corps in Haarlem on 4 April 1940.
54 chapter three
peacetime organisation adopted.��

They
��
included the introduction of a sys-
tem in which NCOs became civil servants after a number of years,14 and
the discontinuation of the preliminary exercise.
In the meantime, a number of events had taken place which had in-
creased international tensions considerably. They were the failure of the
disarmament conferences in 1932 and 1933, and the rise of Hitler’s Ger-
many. Major General I.H. Reijnders, who had succeeded Seyffardt as
Chief of the General Staff in 1934, was therefore tasked by the Minister of
Defence in early 1935 with making proposals for the improvement of the
defence. In February 1935, Reijnders submitted a memorandum which
packed quite a punch.��
��
It was based on a long-term study by the Gener-
al Staff of the latest developments in strategy and demonstrated an acute
insight into the consequences of modern warfare for the Netherlands.15
Reijnders began with the assertion that Germany’s military power had
grown exceptionally since the country had left the League of Nations, re-
introduced conscription and freed itself from the other stipulations of the
Treaty of Versailles. He drew the conclusion that a European war would in
time “have to be considered as a very realistic possibility”. Reijnders also
remarked that, in the event of a German offensive against France, Dutch
territory, unlike in 1914, would probably be violated, as a result of the in-
crease in scale which warfare had since undergone.16
In order to increase combat power, Reijnders advocated an increase in
the annual contingent of conscripts, an increase in the level of training
and an improvement of the materiel and equipment. In November 1935,
the cabinet, led by Prime Minister H. Colijn, decided to introduce a bill
for the establishment of “the fund to improve the materiel and equipment
of the army and of the navy insofar as it concerned the coastal defence of
the Netherlands”.17 The bill was passed on 18 February 1936. In total, this
Defence Fund amounted to 53.4 million guilders, 31 million of which was
14 ��
This
��
system was the regulation by law of the transfer of (career) NCOs to civil ser-
vice jobs.��
��
Conscript NCOs in the rank of sergeant, who had served six years on actual ser-
vice, were entitled to an appointment as a career NCO or a civil servant in a certain number
of jobs. Other categories were marines, corporals of the police troops, marechaussees and
soldiers of the Royal Netherlands East Indies Army. See: J. Vennik, Het capitulantenregle-
ment 1935. Toegelicht en van aanteekeningen voorzien (Alphen aan den Rijn, 1935).
15 ��
The
��
claim by L. de Jong that the pre-war military leadership should be blamed for
a lack of vision can therefore be refuted. See: L. de Jong, Het Koninkrijk der Nederlanden in
de Tweede Wereldoorlog. Deel 1. Voorspel (The Hague, 1969) 636-637; and: G. Teitler, “De
krijgsmacht als Cassandra” in: Teitler, Tussen crisis en oorlog, 70-87.
16 ��
I.H.
��
Reijnders, “Paraatheid Ned.��
Weermacht”,
��
February 1935, in: Documentatie
Nederlands Instituut voor Militaire Historie Den Haag (DC-NIHM), Voorgeschiedenis
W.O. II, Nederland 1922-1938, box 405, file 1.
17 �Keesings Historisch Archief 1935, 2060.
for the army.��

The
��
main points that required urgent attention were anti-air-
craft assets, aircraft, infantry guns and munitions. Effecting the planned
materiel investments would take a considerable amount of time.��
��
Immedi-
ately significant were the improved measures against a strategic raid from
the east.��
��
In 1935 and 1936, at Reijnders’ proposal, casemates with per-
manent surveillance were built near the main bridges over the IJssel, the
Maas-Waal Canal and the Maas, vastly increasing the defensive capability
of these water obstacles. Personnel of the Corps of Police Troops manned
the casemates.
The Defence Fund in fact formed a beginning for the improvements to
the Dutch army. These plans, which also received support from the VDB
and the SDAP, which until then had been strongly opposed to armament,
included the establishment of permanently active territorial commanders,
the expansion of the refresher exercises and an amendment to the Con-
scription Act in 1938. The annual contingent of 19,500 men was increased
to 32,000 and the initial term of service was increased from five-and-half
to eleven months. The latter measure meant that the armed forces had
combat-ready troops at their disposal, as the infantry conscripts received
their training with the first battalion of the regiment and then served for
six months with the second battalion, which was given combat-ready sta-
tus from then on.��
In
��
addition, the size of the army increased with the ar-
rival of larger drafts. The downside was that the problems with the initial
term of service and the command in wartime were growing, as the profes-
sional officers and NCOs, small as their numbers were, had to be divided
over a greater number of troops. The army leadership compensated for this
somewhat by allowing reserve officers to become professional servicemen.
As early as 1937, General Reijnders set out in an urgency programme
what needed to be procured: artillery, anti-aircraft guns, antitank guns,
aircraft, tanks and armoured vehicles.18 The procurement of the materiel
met with obstacles, which led to delays in the introduction. The arms race
had now taken on a more general nature, and the demand for arms was
therefore great.��
As
��
the Netherlands was a trend follower and did not be-
gin rearming until a later stage, and had no major weapons industry of
its own, the shortage on the international arms market formed a major
obstacle. The problems increased when Germany later prohibited arms
exports.
The air defence, which was part of the army, was vastly improved in
1938 with the establishment of the Air Defence Command, commanded
18 ��
��
I.H. Reijnders, “Urgentieprogramma”, 4 February 1937, in: DC-NIMH, Voorge-
schiedenis W.O. II. Nederland 1922-1938, box 405, file 15.
56 chapter three
by the competent Major General P.W. Best. The aviation brigade, the anti-
aircraft artillery and the searchlights, the aircraft warning service and the
commands of the air-defence sectors were brought together in a single or-
ganisation.��
It
��
was well organised, but its combat power left much to be de-
sired.��
��
Despite the fact that the importance of good air defence was recog-
nised, the air fleet was not very large in 1940: 125 aircraft, 60 of which
were obsolete. There were also insufficient numbers of anti-aircraft guns.
The Royal Netherlands Navy played a modest role in the defence of the
Netherlands. After all, its main task was in the Netherlands East Indies.
During the interwar period, the main issues were the 1923 Fleet Act and
the 1938 Battle Cruiser Plan. These, however, were fleet plans which were
mainly of interest to the overseas empire. In the Netherlands, the navy’s
tasks included securing minefields and reconnaissance with regard to en-
emy landing fleets. Maintaining neutrality in the Dutch coastal waters was
also part of its task.
The actual defence of the motherland was in the hands of the army,
where the following command structure existed before the mobilisation:
the Chief of the General Staff and the Commander of the Field Army both
came directly under the authority of the Minister of Defence, as did the
Chief of the Navy Staff. The army was therefore led by two authorities,
on an equal level.��
��
This meant that there was a risk of disputes over com-
petency and disagreement on the manner in which the country should
be defended. The latter problem would become more acute in the second
half of the 1930s, as a result of the German threat.
In the second half of the 1930s, willingness was growing among the
Dutch population and the politicians to establish a more powerful de-
fence. Improvement measures were therefore taken, but they generally did
not have sufficient effect. The main problem was the fact that in the design
of the 1922 system, and particularly in the hollowing out that occurred
later, there was insufficient room to quickly turn the peacetime army into
a powerful wartime force if the international situation demanded it. This
would have required a larger number of professional officers and NCOs, a
considerable pool of well-trained reserve personnel and a substantial ma-
teriel reserve.
Rising tensions
In early September 1938, tensions in Europe were rising so fast that in the
Netherlands, too, military preparatory measures were unavoidable, but the
cabinet and Parliament had already taken the necessary steps much ear-
Prince Bernhard receiving a briefing during manoeuvres in the Peel area on 9 October 1939.
Opposite him, wearing a flat cap, is Major General H.F.M. baron van Voorst tot Voorst,
Inspector of the Cavalry and Commander of the Light Division.
Exercise with a smoke screen in front of a Carden Loyd tracked armoured vehicle.
Five of these vehicles were purchased in the early 1930s, to counter ‘serious disturbances’.
They were assigned to the Mobile Artillery Corps.
58 chapter three
lier. This need not come as a surprise. As has been discussed earlier, Dutch
security policy was based on maintaining strict neutrality and non-involve-
ment, whilst at the same time assuming that in the event of an enemy
attack, the country would be able to count on allied support. On the one
hand, this policy was self-contradictory, on the other hand clever use was
being made of the European balance of power for the Netherlands’ own
security. During the 1914-1918 mobilisation, it had proved to be a useful
point of departure for military-political policy. Thanks to skilful political
and diplomatic play, always supported by military measures, and always
making good use of the assumed German and British reluctance to open
up a new front in the Netherlands, the Dutch government had managed to
maintain neutrality until the end of the war, albeit with difficulty at times.
In the second half of the 1930s, it became increasingly clear that Eu-
rope was heading for a new war between Germany on the one hand and
France and Britain on the other hand. The Dutch government was to
maintain formal neutrality until 10 May 1940. The difference compared
with the period before and during the First World War was that this time
it would also actively seek certain guarantees from France and Britain be-
fore the outbreak of war regarding military support in the event of a Ger-
man attack. These attempts, obviously, took place in secret so as not to
jeopardise the official policy of neutrality. In this period, the Dutch army
leadership considered a German attack to be the most likely. In addition,
they assumed that, unlike the situation in the 1914-1918 period, it was
now no longer likely that the Netherlands would be able to stay out of the
impending war. This new situation called for a more active policy of neu-
trality than before.
From a military point of view, the problem lay in the fact that the stra-
tegic position of the Netherlands had changed during the interwar period.
The importance of the Netherlands in the event of a new war between
Germany on the one hand and a coalition consisting of France, Britain
and Belgium on the other hand increased for all parties during those
years. In the first place, France and Belgium strengthened their border
defences in the 1930s. From 1930 onwards, France worked on the con-
struction of the Maginot Line and Belgium built defence works in the Ar-
dennes, along the Meuse and the newly dug Albert Canal between Liège
and Antwerp. Consequently, it was likely that a German offensive against
France would attempt to circumvent those obstacles in the north by
means of an offensive across Dutch territory, through Noord-Brabant and
on to Flanders. Another possibility was that, prior to such an offensive
against France, Germany would first seize control of the Netherlands in
a separate operation. In either case, the Netherlands would become more

vulnerable to a German attack and, consequently, the question as to what
place the Netherlands should have in their operation plans became a more
one pressing for the coalition members.
That twofold effect was also a factor in another issue. The importance
of the Netherlands for the warfare of the great powers increased as a re-
sult of the rapid development of strategic air power in and after the First
World War. It would be much easier for the RAF to strike the German
war industry in the Ruhr area from Dutch airfields than from the other
side of the North Sea. Conversely, the Luftwaffe would be able to establish
an air warning system in the Netherlands to defend the Ruhr area, while
the conquest of the Netherlands would allow Germany to deny the RAF
the use of Dutch airfields. As a result of these two developments, in the
run-up to the Westfeldzug, France, Britain and Germany would therefore
be putting a great deal of thought into deciding which approach to adopt
towards the Netherlands. This also forced Belgium, in a similar position
to the Netherlands, to determine its position.
The Dutch political and military leadership were only too well aware
of these developments. This explains why, in the second half of the 1930s,
the Netherlands increasingly maintained diplomatic contacts behind the
scenes with all the surrounding powers in order to sound out their pos-
sible courses of action towards the Netherlands in the impending war. Re-
garding France and Britain, the question was to what extent they would be
willing to give the Netherlands guarantees prior to the commencement of
hostilities. For their part, these countries were trying to find out whether
the Netherlands would maintain its neutrality or choose sides in the event
of a war. All this activity did not, however, result in the Netherlands main-
taining its neutrality, as had been the case in 1914-1918, nor did it lead to
an alliance between the Netherlands and one of the warring parties prior
to the outbreak of hostilities.
The reason for this was different for each of the countries involved. The
British were greatly interested in using the Dutch airfields, but as long as
the Netherlands did not give up its neutrality, they were reluctant to make
any commitments regarding support for the Netherlands, both due to a
lack of resources and on the grounds that military support would prob-
ably not be able to prevent a Dutch defeat against Germany. Any mater-
iel and British units that had been supplied would then possibly fall into
German hands. France shared the Dutch analysis that Noord-Brabant was
likely to be the first theatre in the German offensive, but was initially more
concerned with what to do about Belgium after the latter had terminated
60 chapter three
its military cooperation with Paris in 1936. The French military planners
would eventually conclude that the allied front had to be extended into
Dutch territory. This decision, which was preceded by arduous discussions
and disagreement, was not reached until shortly before May 1940. France’s
own interests were decisive in this respect because, like London, Paris ex-
pected the Dutch contribution to the allied war effort to be limited.
Over time, the way in which the Netherlands figured in the German
military plans was to vary from merely making use of the Maas crossing
at Maastricht, without any further breach of neutrality, to conquering the
entire country. In the end, however, the interests of the Luftwaffe were to
tip the balance in favour of the latter option. In this case, too, the strength
of the Dutch defence against a German attack hardly carried any weight.
In the end, Belgium and the Netherlands had too little to offer one anoth-
er from a military point of view to persuade each other to make coopera-
tion commitments, either openly or in secret, prior to the commencement
of hostilities.
Under the given circumstances, there was little that the secret diplo-
matic dealings with the allies could yield for the Netherlands and, for its
part, the Netherlands did not have much to offer the other parties either.
The countries thus kept in contact, each waiting for the other to make a
move to break the deadlock. This continued until, in the early morning
of 10 May 1940, Germany drove the Netherlands and the allies into each
other’s arms.
A policy of neutrality does not only consist of secret diplomatic talks
and sounding out each other’s intentions, however. Visible signs of deter-
mination and the will to defend that neutrality by force of arms are equal-
ly crucial factors. For instance, in October 1937, a number of units had
already carried out a trial mobilisation. Austria’s Anschluß with Germany
in March 1938 had led to amendments to legislation being fast-tracked,
with the 38/I draft serving as second battalion with the regiments and the
conscripts from the 38/II draft (March 1938) forming the first battalions.
As a result, for the first time in years, the Netherlands had combat-ready
units at its disposal.
On 27 September 1938, in response to the continuing Sudeten crisis,
telegram O was issued, containing the order to “take positions”.��
This
��
or-
dered the border battalions, formed by the combat-ready second battal-
ions, to take up their positions in the border regions. Together with the
other peacetime units involved in this strategic defence, the border bat-
talions now came under the command of the territorial commanders, the
Commander of Fortress Holland, the Commander of the Den Helder Posi-
tion and the Commander in Zeeland. The commanders took the necessary
measures to complete the strategic defence. As a consequence, a number
of exercises, such as that of the Light Brigade, were interrupted or even
cancelled. Between 15 and 19 September, before telegram O was issued, a
number of units had already taken part in an exercise in ‘strategic defence’.
On 12 September, live ammunition had even been issued to the combat-
ready battalions, and there were trains ready for mobilisation transport.
In addition to telegram O, telegram P was also issued on 27 September
1938, which in fact was a prior warning of the proclamation of the Ex-
traordinary Call-up for External Security (BOUV).��
This
��
BOUV was initi-
ated by telegram Q, which was issued on 28 September at 04.20 hrs. This
mobilised not only seventeen battalions, but also all coastal artillery and
the entire air fleet.��
Under
��
cover of the border battalions, it placed a pro-
tective sphere, as it were, over the country, under which the general mo-
bilisation and concentration could take place.19 This system provided the
cabinet with a flexible instrument with which to maintain neutrality.��
It
��
al-
lowed border troops to be positioned in all directions and the country to
be brought into a state of defence, without having to decide upon general
mobilisation immediately. Mobilisation would result in the disruption of
daily life, could not be sustained indefinitely and might create an impres-
sion abroad of hostile intent, provoking a preventive strike.
Telegram A, the warning telegram for mobilisation, was also issued on
28 September, but in view of the result of the Munich Conference, it was
decided not to issue telegram B, which was to order preliminary mobilisa-
tion. Telegram A was retracted on 3 October. The next day, those who had
been called up by telegram Q returned to their mobilisation centres. On
6 October, the units which had reported for duty after telegram O were
directed back to their peacetime locations.
Tensions mounted considerably again after Italy invaded Albania on
7 April 1939, and telegram O was issued again. Experience had shown,
however, that the telegrams should be issued at longer intervals.��
After
��
tele-
gram P had been issued the same day, telegram Q was issued on 10 April
and the second BOUV was in place. As in 1938, telegram A was issued,
but retracted after considerable time, on 27 May. The BOUV remained in
force, however. Although the numerical strength was decreasing due to all
kinds of leave regulations, the state of alert regarding a possible strategic
raid was maintained.
J.J.C.P. Wilson, Vijf oorlogsdagen en hun twintigjarige voorgeschiedenis (Assen and

19 ��
��
Baarn, 1960) 42.
62 chapter three
The Polish crisis again increased the risk of war. After the soldiers from
the units under the BOUV who were on leave had been called back, tele-
gram A was issued on 23 August. That was soon followed, on 24 August, by
telegram B, which ordered preliminary mobilisation on 25 August. On that
day, a number of categories of officers and NCOs, administrative person-
nel and quartermasters were mobilised. This was done with a view to the
proclamation of the general mobilisation, which was done on 28 August
by means of telegram C. The first day troops reported for duty was 29 Au-
gust. The general mobilisation did not take into account the declaration by
the German envoy J. Graf von Zech on 26 August to Queen Wilhelmina
and Minister of Foreign Affairs Eelco van Kleffens, that Germany would
respect Dutch neutrality.20 Meanwhile, also on 28 August, the Chief of the
General Staff, General Reijnders, had been appointed Commander-in-
Chief of Land and Sea Forces (OLZ).��
This
��
changed the command struc-
ture. In the wartime establishment, that is to say after the proclamation
of the general mobilisation, the OLZ stood above the other commanders
in the chain of command. The OLZ did, however, report to the Minister
of Defence.��
The
��
mobilisation, which was well prepared, went entirely ac-
cording to plan. The soldiers reported to a number of mobilisation centres,
where they received a medical examination and were issued with weap-
ons and equipment. The next phase was to establish Concentration Blue.
Transport to the positions did not pose too many problems either, so that
on 3 September, the 280,000 troops had reached their war locations.
The military geography of the Netherlands
As does any operation plan, the Dutch plan had to take into account a
great many factors of influence. One of those factors was the geography of
the country. The German plan of attack also had to allow for the specific
characteristics of the Dutch landscape.��
In
��
order to understand the de-
bate on the Dutch operation plan in the late 1930s, it is important to look
briefly at the military geography of the Netherlands and its impact on the
defence of the country.
The Netherlands lies at the edge of the European continent and is bor-
dered by the North Sea to the north and west. It borders Belgium to the
south and Germany to the east. The territory does not cover a very large
area. The longest distance from east to west as the crow flies is around
The scene has been described in, inter alia, C. Fasseur, Wilhelmina. Krijgshaftig in
20 ��
��
een vormeloze jas (Amsterdam, 2001) 263.
160 kilometres, and from north to south it is around 250 kilometres. The
shape of the country is very irregular. A former sea arm, the Zuiderzee,
penetrates deeply into the territory. The construction of the IJsselmeer
Dam between 1927 and 1932 closed it off from the sea, and since then
it has been known as the IJsselmeer.��
��
In the far south-west, in the prov-
inces of Zeeland and Zuid-Holland, several islands lie in the delta of the
major rivers, and in the far south-east, along the river Maas, lies the long
and narrow province of Limburg, connecting the ancient Maas fortress
of Maastricht with the rest of the country. In that area, the Netherlands
separates Belgium from Germany. The country is divided into two by the
basin of the major rivers Rhine, Waal and Maas and their estuaries in the
Hollands Diep and the Haringvliet.
Part of the country lies below sea level, namely large sections of the
delta islands and the land west of a north-south line through Utrecht,
from the IJsselmeer to the major rivers. Large parts of the north of the
country are also below sea level.��
��
Also, large sections of the land surround-
ing the rivers lie below the average water level of the rivers. The rest of the
country, south of the rivers and east of Utrecht, is above sea level. These
are mainly elevated, dry areas consisting of sandy soil. An exception is the
Peel area, an elongated marshland in the east of the province of Noord-
Brabant.
The heart of the country lies in the west, encircled by the imaginary
line through Amsterdam-Utrecht-Rotterdam-The Hague. In the interwar
period, some 40% of the population lived in this area. It contained the
key centres of trade and industry, and the two main ports, Rotterdam and
Amsterdam.��
The
��
latter was, and is, also the capital city.��
The
��
seat of govern-
ment was, as it is today, in The Hague.��
��
Utrecht was an important intersec-
tion of roads, railways and waterways.
The Netherlands had maintained a concentrated defence since the
middle of the nineteenth century. That meant that only the heart of the
country would be defended to the last. From the 1880s on, this area was
referred to as Fortress Holland. The coast formed its western front, and its
southern front comprised the river Waal and the Hollands Diep and Ha-
ringvliet waterways. The north was covered by the IJsselmeer and, after the
construction of the IJsselmeer Dam, by the fortifications at Kornwerder-
zand at the eastern end of the dam. The eastern front of Fortress Holland
consisted of a line of forts and inundations running through Utrecht: the
New Dutch Waterline. Within Fortress Holland lay the Defence Line of
Amsterdam, a circular position around the capital providing the Dutch
army a final refuge from any superior enemy.
64 chapter three
The area around the major rivers formed a strong, defensible barrier
against any attack on Fortress Holland from the south, from Belgium or
France for instance. For an attacker from the east, i.e. Germany, the river
area formed a strategic boundary. Any attack on Fortress Holland would
have to take place to the north or south of it. The river area itself was not
suitable for an advance from the east involving a sizeable force, as there
was too little room to manoeuvre. Both south and north of the major
rivers, the elevated sandy ground was much better suited for an attack.
There, the Dutch defence made use of natural obstacles.��
��
North of the riv-
ers, those obstacles were the river IJssel, the Gelderse Vallei, which con-
tained the Grebbe Line, and the eastern edge of the polder area of Hol-
land, where the New Dutch Waterline had been constructed. South of the
rivers, the first defence line was formed by the river Maas. Behind it lay
the Peel marshland, also easily defensible.
The most direct and most logical path of attack from the east was north
of the major rivers. It was this axis of advance on which the Dutch defence
concentrated, which explains the positions of the IJssel Line, the Grebbe
Line and the Waterline.��
��
By comparison, the Netherlands was poorly de-
fended south of the major rivers. If an attack from the east were to take
place by that route, it would therefore initially be successful. In order to
advance into Fortress Holland, however, the attacker would eventually
have to cross through the river area and the further west he advanced, the
more difficult that would be.
Strategic policy
On 3 September, the day when Britain and France declared war on Ger-
many, the entire Dutch army had been mobilised, but the question was
whether they were also prepared for war. The period following September
1939 was characterised by the construction of positions and the conduct-
ing of exercises.
The new Minister of Defence in the new cabinet of jonkheer D.J. de
Geer, which had taken office in August, was Lieutenant Colonel A.Q.H.
Dijxhoorn of the General Staff. From 1934, he had worked alternately
for the Field Army and the General Staff Division of the Ministry of De-
fence, and therefore knew the army well. In his new position, he would
soon come into conflict with the newly appointed commander-in-chief.
This was not surprising.��
The
��
scope of their authority was not very clear-
ly defined, so that as a result of a number of specific issues, the minister
and the commander-in-chief had to work out where the military respon-
A 6-Veld field gun being hooked up. A battery of four guns was assigned to each
infantry regiment. In 1940, the army had 224 of these guns.
A 10-Veld field gun being transported across the Rhine at Rhenen by pontoniers.
This type of field gun was introduced in 1927, and was the most up-to-date gun in the
artillery in 1940. The army had 56 of these guns.
66 chapter three
sibility ended and political responsibility began. The problems between

the minister and the commander-in-chief began as soon as the mobili-
sation had been proclaimed. General Reijnders, who reported directly
to the minister and not to the Council of Ministers, insisted on a state
of martial law being declared. The Council of Ministers refused to do so,
however, because the OLZ would then be able to take direct action in nu-
merous areas without consultation. A state of war would be less drastic,
as it would continue to require consultation with the civil authorities. The
cabinet therefore declared a state of war on 1 September 1939, but with
the proviso that only those powers could be exercised which were related
to establishing combat positions and obstacles. To meet Reijnders’ wishes
to some extent, in early November martial law was declared in the areas
where the various positions were located. Reijnders was disappointed but
accepted this restriction of his authority. In the same period, Reijnders
also clashed with Dijxhoorn over the acceptability of social-democratic
clubs for conscripts, the mobilisation clubs. This issue was not going to be
the last problem for the commander-in-chief, however. There were some
tough nuts to be cracked where war policy was concerned. It should not
be forgotten that Dijxhoorn and Reijnders’ personalities clashed, and that
it must have been difficult for the commander-in-chief to have a minister
above him who until recently had worked for his own staff.
The general expectation was that the Netherlands, if it were attacked,
would have to fend for itself for some time—estimates ran from a few
weeks to several months—in a war which could last for a consider-
able length of time, as had the First World War. A letter from Minister
of War J.J.C. van Dijk dated 12 July 1924, for instance, showed that the
army would have to be able to fight for three months before it could count
on assistance from allies or intervention by the League of Nations.21 That
expectation of three months of war was also voiced a number of times
in the 1930s.��
��
In a meeting of the Economic Defence Preparations Com-
mittee in 1938 regarding stockpiling of food, the military representative,
Captain J.C. Roelofsen, also mentioned the anticipated three-month war.22
In 1937, the goal set for the air forces in wartime was that in two months’
time, 50% of the wartime strength on paper would be delivered by the
industry, anticipating the loss of half of the aircraft during that period.23
21 ��
M.L.
��
van Ham, “De verzorging van de Koninklijke Landmacht in 1939 en 1940”
(unpublished manuscript, Netherlands Institute of Military History, The Hague, s.a.).
G. Trienekens, Ons volk en de honger. De voedselvoorziening 1940-1945 (Utrecht,
22 ��
��
1985) 36-37.
R. de Bruin et al., Illusies en incidenten. De militaire luchtvaart en de neutraliteits-
23 ��
��
handhaving tot 10 mei 1940 (The Hague, s.a.) 270.
68 chapter three
As has been mentioned, in the 1920s, various concentrations had been

prepared for the defence of the country.��
Under
��
pressure due to the in-
ternational situation, in 1934 and 1935 the General Staff elaborated on
Concentration Blue. This was approved by the Minister of Defence, H.
Colijn, in 1936. The plans entailed a defence of the ‘heart of the coun-
try’ by the IInd and IVth Corps in the Gelderse Vallei area, by Brigade A
at the Betuwe Position and by Brigade B at the Maas-Waal Position. The
idea of a concentration in a line along the IJssel, which was the plan in
1925, was abandoned. There were insufficient troops available to mount
a proper defence of the long IJssel Line. The shorter line in the Gelderse
Vallei (Grebbe Line) was more favourable in that respect.��
From
��
that po-
sition, the Field Army would be able to fall back on the time-honoured
New Dutch Waterline (Nieuwe Hollandse Waterlinie), where the defence
was to be sustained to the very end. In Reijnders’ plan, the Ist Corps was
garrisoned as a reserve, between the Hook of Holland and Haarlem, and
was under the direct command of the commander-in-chief.��
��
The Light Di-
vision would be partly concentrated in the south-east of Noord-Brabant
and partly in Apeldoorn. The surveillance troops were positioned along
the eastern, southern and western borders. South of the major rivers, the
Peel-Raam Position was to be occupied by the IIIrd Corps and the Peel Di-
vision.��
The
��
concentration directives therefore entailed a defence of For-
tress Holland, while the IIIrd Corps was to firmly prevent the enemy from
passing through Noord-Brabant and Limburg. The army leadership was
now counting on speedy assistance from France and Britain in the event
of a German invasion. Of chief importance to allied cooperation were the
province of Zeeland, where the British could land, and the province of
Noord-Brabant, where the French could deploy.
The way in which Reijnders, Chief of Staff since 1934, had had Concen-
tration Blue elaborated brought him into conflict with the Commander of
the Field Army, at that time Lieutenant General W. Röell. The latter was
of the opinion that by not letting the Field Army engage in a decisive bat-
tle in the Gelderse Vallei, Reijnders was underestimating its significance.
After all, the Field Army’s tasks had always included mobile and offen-
sive operations. Röell was succeeded in April 1937 by Lieutenant General
J.J.G. baron van Voorst tot Voorst, who was also dissatisfied with the role
Reijnders had assigned the Field Army. In July 1937, he complained to
the Chief of the General Staff that the latter’s description of the Field Ar-
my’s first task, namely to mount a “staunch defence” in the Gelderse Val-
lei, forced it to take up a prepared position. He preferred to have the task
changed to “opposing a breakthrough into Dutch territory in the stron-
gest possible manner”. Such an assignment would give the Field Army the
freedom to mount a mobile and offensive defence, by engaging the enemy
at an early stage, with flanking manoeuvres in unexpected places in the
Veluwe area, along the IJssel, or across the major rivers in Noord-Brabant.
In addition, it would be easier to adapt the operations to the actual pro-
gress of the German attack. In an internal memo of the same period, Van
Voorst tot Voorst followed the examples of great generals from the past,
such as Frederick the Great, Helmuth von Moltke and Stadholder William
III, and then concluded that it was not possible to derive sound opera-
tional plans from the concentration chosen by Reijnders:
It is not a matter of destroying the enemy. Every forward movement will
lead to divergent action. One then fulfils the enemy’s every expectation. He
can opt either to block off the chosen position or to carry out a carefully
planned systematic attack on the weakest point.24
In February 1939, Van Voorst tot Voorst yielded to Reijnders inasmuch as

he accepted the establishment of a prepared position in the Gelderse Val-
lei. Opinions continued to differ as to the use of this line. In Van Voorst
tot Voorst’s view, Reijnders’ defensive approach was doomed to failure.
Defensive operations alone would leave the initiative to the attacker and
could, if successful, only win time, but never force an outcome. The Field
Army would be beginning a hopeless fight, which could only end in de-
feat. A forward defence was therefore what was needed to defend the
Grebbe Line, by offensive manoeuvres in the Veluwe area. If this were to
deter the enemy, and he were to bear southwards to continue the attack
through Noord-Brabant, the Field Army would be able to threaten his
flank, again by means of an offensive operation.
The requirement that the permanent position had to be suitable for
offensive operations meant that Van Voorst tot Voorst also rejected the
New Dutch Waterline as the location for the last line of resistance. Due to
its extensive inundation areas and narrow access routes, it was simply not
suitable as a base for an offensive operation. That was why the main line
of resistance had to be at the Grebbe Line.25 In addition, Van Voorst tot
Voorst had serious doubts about the success of a retreat to the New Dutch
Waterline, faced with an enemy which had tried and tested airpower,
�� baron van Voorst tot Voorst, “Memorie op grond van de ontworpen Concen-
24 ��
J.J.G.
tratie Blauw”, 11 July 1937, in: DC-NIMH, Voorgeschiedenis W.O. II, Mobilisatie 1938-
1940, box 440, bundel I, no. 1; See also: J.J.G. baron van Voorst tot Voorst to I.H. Reijnders,
16 July 1937, in: Ibidem.
�� baron van Voorst tot Voorst, “Memorandum I betreffende de ‘Stelling van de
25 ��
J.J.G.
Geldersche Vallei’”, 19 February 1939, in: DC-NIMH, Voorgeschiedenis W.O. II, Mobilisa-
tie 1938-1940, box 440b, bundel IV, no. 12.
The poster proclaiming the
general mobilisation on 28
August 1939 (left); the first
day of the mobilisation:
a banner shows reservists
where to report (below).
motorised troops and tanks. The distance between the two lines was too
short for the Field Army to be able to shake off the enemy properly. Van
Voorst tot Voorst also held the view that establishing two major posi-
tions one behind the other would be unnecessarily costly. Moreover, the
Gelderse Vallei provided better cover on account of the vegetation in the
terrain, and was more suitable for the construction of fortifications due
to the nature of the soil and the groundwater level. The line there would
therefore be better able to withstand air attacks and artillery fire than the
Waterline. Lastly, the Grebbe Line, extended to the Maas by means of the
Betuwe Position and the Maas-Waal Position, protected a larger part of
the country.
Reijnders’ appointment as commander-in-chief on 28 August 1939 and
the general mobilisation in the days that followed created a new situation.
In his new role, Reijnders was now the superior of the Commander of the
Field Army.��
As
��
early as 9 September, he succeeded in persuading the cabi-
net to order him, in the event of an attack from the east, to pull back the
Field Army to the New Dutch Waterline, without allowing it to engage in
a decisive battle at the Grebbe Line. That was the only place where at least
some preparation had been made for the country’s defence. Reijnders did
not, however, have any troops with which to further bring the Waterline
into a state of defence. The Ist Corps, which was supposed to receive the
retreating Field Army at the Waterline, was for the time being positioned
along the coast, in view of the all-round neutrality.
Van Voorst tot Voorst’s approach was better in that respect, even
though it did not seem so at first glance.��
��
Work had been done on a de-
fence line in the Gelderse Vallei on several occasions in the seventeenth
and eighteenth centuries. Later, there had been plans for work, but they
were never implemented. The concentration plans of the 1920s were
based either on the Waterline or the IJssel Line. The main objection to
the Grebbe Line, the fact that the southern part lay too high for it to be
inundated naturally, had never been addressed. A water obstacle could
only be established here by building a bombproof pumping station in
a stream called the Grift. The only reinforcement of the Grebbe Line in
the 1930s had been the construction of a number of casemates at strate-
gic traffic intersections. This had hardly produced a defensible position,
however. The main advantage for Van Voorst tot Voorst was that he had
sufficient troops to establish a satisfactory position in the Gelderse Vallei.
After all, two corps with a total of four divisions were concentrated there.
The Commander of the Field Army therefore immediately set his troops
to digging, and had them continue unabatedly, even after he had heard in
72 chapter three
Rising inundation
near Woudenberg in
the Valley Position.
mid-October that the government had ordered Reijnders to retreat to the

Waterline if necessary.
There was another strategically significant matter on which the Com-
mander of the Field Army and the commander-in-chief differed, namely
the defence of Noord-Brabant.��
��
Together with the north of Belgian Bra-
bant, the area formed the link between Fortress Holland and the Belgian
forward defence line, which lay between Antwerp and Liège, along the Al-
bert Canal.��
��
Together with Zeeland and the north of Limburg, Noord-Bra-
bant was of vital importance to allied cooperation in the event of a Ger-
man attack. The area therefore had to be defended long enough to give the
allies the opportunity to deploy there. The question was, however, exactly
where, with how many troops and at what price that defence was to be
maintained. The matter was complicated by the policy of neutrality, which
precluded any consultations on the matter with Brussels, Paris or London.
The Peel-Raam Position was chosen as the line of resistance, in accor-

dance with Concentration Blue. Work on this position had begun as early
as 1934. It was manned by the Peel Division. The IIIrd Corps and part of,
later all of, the Light Division were concentrated further back. Reijnders
wanted the defence of the position to be maintained for a number of days.
In doing so, however, the IIIrd Corps and the Light Division were not to be
exposed to the risk of destruction. Due to a shortage of troops, Reijnders’
wish was, in the event of an imminent breach of the Peel-Raam Position,
for the IIIrd Corps and the Light Division to retreat to within Fortress Hol-
land, where they would be assigned new tasks.
Van Voorst tot Voorst had serious doubts about the feasibility of the
retreat plan, and feared that the position would be outflanked on the
right, across Belgian territory, as the Belgian army only had weak units
positioned there. He therefore proposed to defend Noord-Brabant further
to the west, along a line between ’s-Hertogenbosch, Tilburg and Goirle,
which he dubbed the Orange Position. The route back for the IIIrd Corps
and the Light Division would then be shorter and the enemy would face
a difficult advance from the border through an area full of obstacles and
demolitions, before he reached the position.��
��
In addition, the Orange Posi-
tion was much shorter than the Peel-Raam Position, allowing a stronger
defence with the same number of troops.
Details of the French operation plans, which became available in late
November 1939, reinforced the arguments of the Commander of the
Field Army. The Dutch military attaché in Paris and Brussels, Lieutenant
Colonel D. van Voorst Evekink, had heard from French contacts, as well
as from Belgian sources, that the French commander-in-chief, général
d’armée Maurice Gamelin, was planning to establish a forward defensive
front in Belgium. This front would stretch all the way to Antwerp.
Since 1936, France had been looking into the possibility of military
intervention in Belgium. The plans elaborated on earlier Franco-Belgian
military cooperation based on their military alliance of 1920, cooperation
which had had come to something of a dead end since 1927. In 1936, Ger-
man troops had again occupied the demilitarised Rhineland, and Belgium
had again declared its neutrality. The French high command considered
several operational possibilities without coming to a decision. This failure
to commit could not continue when the French government declared war
on Germany in September 1939. The plan of choice was now the “plan Es-
caut”. This entailed the French troops and the British Expeditionary Force
establishing a defensive front behind the upper course of the Scheldt:
from Valenciennes, via Tournai and Oudenaarde, to Ghent.��
In
��
early No-
74 chapter three
vember 1939, the French commander-in-chief, Gamelin, was also bearing

in mind the possibility that Germany would mount a limited operation
with the sole purpose of conquering the Netherlands, or invade Belgium
through Dutch Noord-Brabant and Limburg. Both options were equally
dangerous, and France would have to respond. In the “hypothèse Hol-
lande”, the Franco-British front would have to lie much further north and
east. It would follow the Meuse from the border town of Givet, via Namur
to Liège and then turn along the back of the Albert Canal to Antwerp.
Paratroops would be dropped on Walcheren and at the isthmus of Zuid-
Beveland, to enable French ground troops to deploy in Zeeland.��
Dur-
ing the rest of the month of November, this hypothèse developed into a
firm, albeit it more limited, plan in the French planning process, the “plan
Dyle”. In this plan, Gamelin opted for a front behind the Meuse, from Gi-
vet to Namur.��
��
From there, it would not continue to Liège, but turn north-
wards to Wavre and from there it would follow the river Dyle to Louvain
and then link up with the Belgian positions at Antwerp. Contrary to the
“plan Escaut”, Brussels would then also lie behind the allied defence. The
airborne landings in Zeeland disappeared from the plans on 23 December
1939. Motorised and mechanised units would engage in mobile defensive
and delaying combat operations in the space between the front from Ant-
werp to Namur and the Albert Canal, in cooperation with the Belgian
units positioned there. It was a daring plan, and therefore controversial in
the eyes of Gamelin’s subordinate commanders, but he was determined.
This plan had not yet set his mind entirely at ease, however. There was a
gaping hole in the defence between the Belgian defence behind the Albert
Canal and the Dutch Peel-Raam Position. This would allow the Germans
to move in behind the Peel-Raam Position and then take Noord-Brabant
and Zeeland.��
��
The physical cohesion with the Dutch main defence at For-
tress Holland would then be broken and the Scheldt estuary, and access
to the port of Antwerp, would be in enemy hands.��
��
He was therefore toy-
ing with the idea of sending French divisions even further north, as far as
Fortress Holland. The link-up point would be in western Brabant, so that
the Moerdijk bridges across the Hollands Diep would form the physical
connection. This manoeuvre was known as the “hypothèse Breda”.
Van Voorst Evekink was able to brief Reijnders in general terms on the
latest state of affairs with regard to the French plans.��
��
No matter how posi-
tive these reports were, however, they also made it clear that the French
were not planning to advance further eastwards than the Breda area, or
Tilburg at a push. In any case, it was not to be expected that a combined
defence would be mounted at the Peel-Raam Position with strong French
Members of Parliament visiting the positions of the Field Army in autumn 1939, during the
mobilisation. They are being led by the Commander of the Field Army, Lieutenant General
J.J.G. baron van Voorst tot Voorst.
Hussars-Motorcyclists crossing a water obstacle during an exercise in 1939, using a float.

76 chapter three
units. This argued in favour of the Commander of the Field Army and his
Orange Position.
Reijnders, however, and following his advice, the cabinet, which had
been informed of the French plans in early December, insisted on the
Peel-Raam Position, despite all the operational objections. His arguments
were of a political rather than a military nature. A position at Breda or
Tilburg would leave large parts of Noord-Brabant undefended, with the
exception of the border defence and the line along the Maas, and give the
Germans the opportunity to invade Belgium almost unchallenged. Such
a position would therefore damage the allied interests and that might be
held against the Netherlands during peace negotiations after a German
defeat. Secondly, in this position it would be a long while before large
Dutch units engaged in battle with the German army. This would mean a
dangerous delay in the moment when France and Britain would recognise
the Netherlands as an ally. The Peel-Raam Position, on the other hand,
would bring that moment forward to the first hours of the war and would
obstruct the German advance route to the Albert Canal.
So even after Reijnders had been appointed commander-in-chief, his
differences of opinion with Van Voorst tot Voorst did not come to an end.
Even intervention by Minister Dijxhoorn, who had serious doubts about
the feasibility of Reijnders’ plans, did not change that, nor did cabinet
meetings or consultations with the Queen. The government’s assignment
to the commander-in-chief of 9 September 1939 was changed on 7 Janu-
ary 1940, however, although the new assignment contained no firm deci-
sions either. In the meantime, the difficult relationship between Reijnders
on the one hand and Dijxhoorn and the other members of the cabinet
on the other hand deteriorated noticeably. After the conflict on the state
of war, the argument about the mobilisation clubs and the incompatibilité
d’humeur between the commander-in-chief and the minister, doubts now
also arose about the commander-in-chief ’s understanding of strategy,
whilst Reijnders for his part suspected that the Commander of the Field
Army and the cabinet were trying to take his place.26
26 ��
Particularly
��
instructive regarding the difference of opinions are annexes 15 through
18 in part Ib of: Enquêtecommissie Regeringsbeleid 1940-1945. Verslag houdende de uitkom-
sten van het onderzoek (The Hague, 1949) from the correspondence between the Command-
er of the Field Army, the commander-in-chief and the Minister of Defence in the period No-
vember 1939-January 1940. See also: De Jong, Koninkrijk. Deel 2. Neutraal, 66-67, 203-221,
235 ff. For an analysis of the problems surrounding the position of the commander-in-chief
in Dutch political and military relations in general, and those in 1939-1940 in particular,
see: H. Amersfoort, ed., ‘Een kwestie van vertrouwen’. De geschiedenis van het opperbevel in
Nederland en Nederlands-Indië. Annex to Van wankel evenwicht naar versterkte defensieor-
ganisatie. Advies van de Adviescommissie Opperbevelhebberschap. The Hague, 19 April 2002.
During January 1940, tensions surrounding Reijnders mounted even

further. The Council of Ministers grew increasingly convinced that the
commander-in-chief ’s position was untenable. On 31 January 1940,
Reijnders handed in his resignation, after Prime Minister De Geer had in-
formed him personally that Dijxhoorn had threatened to resign.��
His
��
res-
ignation was accepted on 6 February.
One of the candidates for the vacant position of commander-in-chief
was Major General H.F.M. baron van Voorst tot Voorst.��
He
��
was not eli-
gible, however, as having a Catholic commander-in-chief alongside a
Catholic Commander of the Field Army, who was also his brother, was
considered inadvisable. It was the former Minister of Defence, J.J.C. van
Dijk who suggested Lieutenant General H.G. Winkelman. Winkelman
himself had expected to become Chief of the General Staff in 1934. He
had retired instead, and the position was filled by Reijnders. Winkelman’s
career included such positions as Assistant Chief of the General Staff and
Chief of Staff of the Field Army. In the latter position, he had also been
the superior of then Captain A.Q.H. Dijxhoorn. From 1938, Winkelman
held a position with the Philips lighting company in Eindhoven as advis-
er on evacuation measures in the event of a war. When the mobilisation
was announced, he was called up on active service again, and appointed
Commander of the Utrecht-Soesterberg Air Defence Sector.��
��
On 6 Febru-
ary 1940, Winkelman was appointed commander-in-chief. Major General
H.F.M. baron van Voorst tot Voorst became his Chief of the Army Staff.
Winkelman’s operation plan
The lack of unity between the two main commanders had had its effects on
the preparations for a possible war in the late 1930s, as far as the operation
plan was concerned. Time was slowly running out. On 10 January 1940, a
small German military communications aircraft had made an emergency
landing at Maasmechelen in Belgium. On that occasion, documents were
seized regarding operations on a front between the North Sea and the Mo-
selle, and in particular an airborne operation west of Dinant. The opinions
were divided as to how significant these documents should be considered
to be. There were other reports as well, however, such as warnings from the
Dutch military attaché in Berlin, Major G.J. Sas, which indicated that there
was a growing risk of war with Germany. Food for thought in that respect
was also provided by the fact that the German air force, as well as the Brit-
ish, incidentally, conducted regular reconnaissance flights over Dutch ter-
78 chapter three
ritory and that the German intelligence services were showing an interest
in the Netherlands.
The kidnapping, near Venlo, of two British secret agents to Germa-
ny on 9 November 1939, known as the Venlo incident, was still fresh in
people’s memories. Winkelman realised that it was time to put an end to
the uncertainty regarding the appropriate strategic policy. Winkelman
was also aware, even more so than Reijnders, that the army was not large
enough to defend the entire country. Further concentration of the combat
power within Fortress Holland therefore appeared inevitable in his view.
Another point of departure for Winkelman’s operation plan was to rely
as little as possible on the successful outcome of a mobile and offensive
operation by the army, because it was insufficiently armed, equipped and
trained.��
All
��
in all, Winkelman shifted the focus of the Dutch strategy to-
wards a straightforward operation plan, with a strong static-defensive ele-
ment. The Field Army was bound to prepared lines and positions even
more so than before.
Winkelman’s measures demonstrate another point. There had never
been a sound basis of trust between Reijnders and the cabinet.��
The
��
cabi-
net had therefore constantly kept the commander-in-chief in close check,
with carefully formulated instructions. Winkelman, by contrast, did have
their trust. He was given much more leeway, and was able to make his
own decisions on various occasions, decisions which included political as-
pects and which could have required consultation with the cabinet.
North of the major rivers, Winkelman chose the Grebbe Line as the
main defence line. In accordance with the views of the Commander of the
Field Army and of the cabinet, he decided that the operational risks in-
volved in a deliberate retreat, as Reijnders had wanted, were too great. He
also removed any illusions the Commander of the Field Army might have
had of an offensive break-out from the position. The IInd and IVth Corps
were to fight the battle in the position only. His opting for the Grebbe Line
should therefore not be seen as support for the operational ideas of the
Commander of the Field Army, but as a sign of his having a sense of real-
ity.��
The
��
course of events had made the Gelderse Vallei into a strong posi-
tion under construction, whereas much less work had been done on the
Waterline. After all the talking that had been done about the Grebbe Line
since 1934, initiatives by J.J.G. baron van Voorst tot Voorst to improve
this line had resulted in a fait accompli, that under the circumstances of
imminent war could not be ignored.��
A
��
disadvantage of the gradual deci-
sion-making process was that nothing had been done yet about the weak
point of the position, namely the lack of inundation areas in the southern
A 6-Veld field gun in position in the New Dutch Waterline near Naarden, winter 1939-1940.
The Light Division on field exercise during the 1939-1940 mobilisation.

80 chapter three
part. Construction of a bombproof pumping station did not begin until

late 1939. It would not yet be operational by May 1940. The line was also
reinforced with troops which were removed from the Waterline and the
border defence. The Waterline was now almost entirely devoid of troops.
This was not problematic in Winkelman’s view, as the Ist Corps, stationed
at the coast, was available as a strategic reserve.
It was more difficult for Winkelman to come to a decision regarding
Noord-Brabant. The Peel-Raam Position was under construction, but in
order for it to be defended successfully, it would have to connect with the
Belgian positions and have the certainty of French troops arriving in time.
The policy of neutrality officially precluded any consultations with future
allies and even the assignment which Winkelman received from the gov-
ernment in early April 1940 regarding war policy did not give him room
to conduct any such consultations, no matter how liberally it was formu-
lated. Winkelman, however, considered the issue to be of such importance
that he decided, regardless of the risk of serious political damage, to have
Van Voorst Evekink seek renewed contact with the Belgian and French
army leaderships.27 Winkelman’s expectations regarding the allies, mean-
while, were not inconsiderable, and in fact not realistic.28 As Reijnders had
done, he had memoranda deposited with the diplomatic missions in Brus-
sels, Paris and London, which were to be presented to the respective gov-
ernments after a German attack. In those memoranda, the commander-
in-chief set out his operation plans and asked France for an entire corps of
four divisions. The French air force was to disrupt German bridge-laying
activities across the Maas and IJssel.��
��
Britain was asked for a division to de-
fend Zeeland, and the transfer of air defence artillery and ten squadrons
of fighter and reconnaissance aircraft to Fortress Holland.
As has been mentioned, the Dutch were familiar with part of the
French and Belgian operation plans. Just before his resignation, Reijnders
had asked General R. van Overstraeten, Head of the Military Office of the
King of Belgium, whether the Belgians would be prepared to extend the
Peel-Raam Position into Belgium.��
The
��
answer was negative.��
Van
��
Over-
straeten proposed a combined line between the Bergsche Maas and the
Albert Canal, along the Waalwijk–Tilburg–Turnhout line, partly over-
lapping the Orange Position which Van Voorst tot Voorst had envisaged.
An identical request in mid-February from Winkelman to the Belgian
27 ��
��
The contacts with London were more limited than those with Brussels and Paris
and mainly concerned navy matters and the possible transport to Britain of the gold of the
Central Bank of the Netherlands. These contacts will mostly not be considered here.
B. Chaix, En Mai 1940, Fallait-il entrer en Belgique? Décisions stratégiques et plans
28 ��
��
opérationnels de la campagne de France (Paris, 2000) 107-113.
military attaché in The Hague, Colonel P.J. Diepenrijckx, was also turned
down. Winkelman’s threat–made with the knowledge of Van Kleffens and
Dijxhoorn–that the Belgian stance would force him to practically evacu-
ate Noord-Brabant in the event of war, was equally unsuccessful in chang-
ing Van Overstraeten’s mind.��
��
The latter was left to conclude that the Neth-
erlands, in its evacuation plans, had opted for a “stratégie d’isolement”.29
Subsequently, on 5 April 1940, Winkelman had Van Voorst Evekink
consult with French commander-in-chief Gamelin. It became apparent
that in Belgium, the French and British troops would respond to a Ger-
man offensive by forming a defensive front along the Givet–Namur–Lou-
vain–Antwerp line: the “plan Dyle”. Meanwhile, despite persistent doubts
among his subordinate commanders, on 20 March 1940 Gamelin had also
developed the “hypothèse Breda” into a firm plan, the “plan Breda”. This
became part of the assignment of the French 7th Army, which Gamelin
had already earmarked for the operations on the French left flank in the
“hypothèse Hollande” and the “plan Dyle”. Earlier on, i.e. in the “plan Es-
caut”, this army had been positioned at Rheims, as a central strategic re-
serve for the northern front.
His decision not to maintain a large strategic reserve, but to deploy it
on the left flank instead demonstrates the extent to which Gamelin was
convinced that the point of main effort of the German attack would be in
Flanders, as it had been in 1914. This expectation had led him to believe
that the front in Belgium would be progressively stronger the further north
it was extended. It would then be impossible to outflank the troops there
and it would lend cohesion to the Dutch, Belgian, British and French op-
erations. On the other hand, the success of Gamelin’s strategy was entirely
dependent on the enemy’s actions. If the German main effort were to be
elsewhere and if the Germans were able to conduct their operations swiftly,
he would be powerless to do anything about it. He lacked strong reserves
with which to immediately counter the danger. It would take complex and
lengthy manoeuvres by units which were already engaged in combat before
he would be able to respond to the actual events of the campaign. Gamelin
was of the opinion, however, that he had sufficient time.
For the purpose of the implementation of the decisions made on 20
March 1940, the French and British armies were positioned as follows.
The French force involved the units of the 1st Army Group, commanded
by général d’armée Gaston Henri Bilotte. On the left flank, between the
coast at Dunkirk and Lille, stood, as has been mentioned, the mobile 7th
Army of général d’armée Henri-Honoré Giraud. Its orders were to advance
Quoted in: De Jong, Koninkrijk. Deel 2. Neutraal, 256.
29 ��
��
On 2 December 1939, the Commander of the Field Army, Lieutenant General
J.J.G. baron van Voorst tot Voorst, had a series of photographs sent to the Dutch daily
newspapers, to demonstrate the impassability of the inundated areas. In a covering letter,
the commander said that he considered the publication of the photographs to be “particularly
desirable, also in view of the impression abroad”. This photograph shows a 7-Veld field gun,
with a team of horses and a limber. The 7-Veld field gun was introduced in 1904.
In May 1940, the army had 310 of these guns.
Machine-gun nest at the entrance to the port of Scheveningen during the mobilisation period.
through Flanders to a front on either side of Antwerp. North of that front

it was to occupy the Antwerp–Turnhout–Tilburg line, so that the connec-
tion with Fortress Holland, via Breda, the Moerdijk bridges and Dordrecht,
was covered. South of the front it would defend the Antwerp–Louvain line.
To the right of the 7th Army, in a staging area south-east of Lille, stood
the British Expeditionary Force, commanded by General Lord John Gort.
It was to advance to a line due east of Brussels, between Louvain and
Wavre. Next to the British, between Valenciennes and Maubeuge, stood
the strong 1st Army, commanded by général d’armée Georges Blanchard.
It was destined for the front between Wavre and Namur.��
��
Facing the Ar-
dennes stood the weakest French armies, the 9th Army of général d’armée
André Georges Corap, which consisted almost entirely of reservists, and
the 2nd Army of général d’armée Charles Huntziger.��
By
��
Gamelin’s calcu-
lations, the Germans would need nine days to advance through this in-
accessible, hilly and wooded terrain by the Meuse. They would then take
seven days to prepare to force a river crossing. The Meuse crossing was
therefore to be expected no earlier than the seventeenth day of the of-
fensive. That provided enough time to tackle the problems in this sector.
Halfway into the sector of the 2nd Army, at the fortification at La Ferté,
some 25 kilometres south-east of Sedan as the crow flies, was where the
Maginot Line began. From here to the border with neutral Switzerland,
France considered itself to be safe.
The Netherlands was naturally interested in the advance of the 7th
Army in particular.��
��
On the first day of the war, two of its motorised divi-
sions and one light tank division were to advance to Zeeland and Noord-
Brabant. Three more divisions were to follow later. In the French view,
the Netherlands and Belgium should preferably establish their defence on
the Tilburg–Turnhout line as well, so that Giraud’s army would be able to
reinforce them.��
That
��
same evening, Van Voorst Evekink informed Win-
kelman of the general tenor of the French plans. It was now clear to the
Dutch commander-in-chief what needed to be done in Noord-Brabant.
The attaché noted Winkelman’s response as follows:
In those circumstances, Peel Position will be evacuated by main forces (ap-
prox. 15 battalions remain, without artillery). Main defence will now be:
Grebbe Line–Waal Maas–Merwede Group–Fortress Holland.30
Although hardly flattering, Van Overstraeten’s conclusion mentioned ear-

lier was an apt description of Winkelman’s policy regarding Noord-Bra-
Questioning of D. van Voorst Evekink, 12 August 1948, in: Enquêtecommissie Rege-

30 ��
��
ringsbeleid. Deel Ic, 616.
84 chapter three
bant. On 6 April, the commander-in-chief made the definite decision that

the IIIrd Corps and the Light Division would for the time being remain
concentrated behind the Peel-Raam Position, in order for their presence
to create the illusion of a staunch defence; they were not allowed to en-
gage in combat. In the night following the first day of the war, they would
be pulled back from Noord-Brabant. The Light Division would move to
Fortress Holland, to form the strategic reserve together with the Ist Corps.
The IIIrd Corps would move to the southern front of Fortress Holland and
the Waal-Linge Position. In respect of the retreat, Brigade B, positioned in
the Land van Maas en Waal area, would move back to behind the south-
ern Grebbe Line, in order to serve as an operational reserve there for the
Field Army.
After capturing the Maas Line, in Noord-Brabant the Germans would
only be faced with the Peel Division, positioned along an extended front.
This meant that the defence of Noord-Brabant, and with it, the link-up
between Fortress Holland and the allied front, came to depend upon the
French deployment in this area. Both military and politically, Winkelman
was banking heavily on future events, especially considering the fact that
the distance which the German units would have to cover to reach Breda
was around half the distance the French would have to go.31 If they succeed-
ed in swiftly breaching the Peel-Raam Position, the Germans had the best
chance of winning the race for Breda. A few days later, on 11 April, Van
Voorst Evekink informed Gamelin in writing of Winkelman’s decisions.
This did not change the plans for the French advance. Gamelin held on to
his own reasoning that the defence would be strongest if it were extended as
far north as possible. The subordinate commanders in the 7th Army, which
was earmarked for the Belgian-Dutch border area, were not informed ei-
ther. This was to lead to some unpleasant surprises for them in May.
In April 1940, tensions in Europe were rising considerably. On 9 April,
there came the shocking news that German airborne troops had taken the
airports at Copenhagen and Oslo, in surprise attacks.��
In
��
addition, it be-
came clear that these troops had received assistance from fifth columns
among the Danish and Norwegian populations.��
An
��
attack on the Nether-
lands loomed. As a result of the events in Norway and Denmark, General
Winkelman ordered extra security at the main airfields.��
An
��
infantry bat-
talion each was assigned to Schiphol, Waalhaven, Ypenburg and Valken-
burg. The 1st Hussars-Motorcyclist Regiment, which was part of the Light
K.H. Frieser, Blitzkrieg-Legende. Der Westfeldzug 1940 (Munich, 1995) 108. For the
31 ��
��
French plans for the operations in the Netherlands, see: Chaix, En Mai 1940, 107-113, 149-
150, 168-172, 179-183.
Division, was moved from Noord-Brabant to Wassenaar, a village near

The Hague. Armoured vehicles were made available for the defence of
Ypenburg and Waalhaven. Roads and certain parts of the terrain near The
Hague were blocked to prevent enemy landings.��
��
On 22 April, the Com-
mander of the Air Defence, Lieutenant General P.W. Best, emphasised to
his airfield commanders:
After all, the outward defence of the airfield may not be neglected entirely,
as there is the possibility that a forced landing of foreign troops may be ac-
companied by attacks along the ground by paratroops dropped outside the
airfield previously, or by malicious elements living here.32
Winkelman saw reason to further strengthen the defence of the heart

of the country. The IIIrd Corps was now stationed further west, near
’s-Hertogenbosch, which would facilitate a retreat to Fortress Holland. Six
extra infantry battalions were positioned to strengthen the Betuwe front.
Two came from Groningen and Drenthe, and the other four were from
the eastern front of Fortress Holland. Six battalions, and three battalions
of 7-Veld field guns, were sent from the southern front to the eastern front
of Fortress Holland. Orders had also been given for the expansion of the
inundation areas. On 10 April, all leave was cancelled, but this order was
revoked on the 27th. Nonetheless, the situation remained explosive. An
intelligence report of 26 April 1940 summarised it as follows:
Although the tension appears to have eased somewhat, peace of mind is out
of the question. The position of the German troops is such, that at any given
moment an attack could be mounted towards the west, whereby the right
wing north of the rivers, covered by German troops, could choose its ad-
vance through Noord-Brabant.��
��
The operation against Norway has not weak-
ened the German air force significantly. Presumably, the German airpower
is relatively more occupied due to this operation. This can, of course, have a
delaying effect on an operation in westerly direction.33
Tensions rose further during the first few days of May 1940. The combat-
readiness of certain units was increased, and further preparations for in-
undations were made. On 6 May, Major Sas warned of a possible attack on
8 May.��
��
When it did not materialise, leave was granted again in certain cas-
es. On 8 May, reports reached General Headquarters of troop movements
on the German side of the border, reports which increased in number
over the course of the following day. In two telephone calls in the evening
of 9 May, Major Sas was more adamant than ever in warning of a German
Quoted in: F.J. Molenaar, De luchtverdediging mei 1940 (The Hague, 1970) 103-104.
32 ��
��
33 ��
C.-Brigade B., “Mededeeling van gegevens no.��
��
27”,
��
in: DC-NIMH, Voorgeschiede-
nis W.O. II. Nederland 1938-1940, box 415, file 19.
86 chapter three
attack the next morning. The stream of reports which Winkelman had
faced that day, increased the credibility of Sas’ reports. At headquarters,
the feeling was growing that war was imminent. At around nine o’clock
that evening, therefore, a telex was sent out with the following message:
“Very alarming reports are coming in from the border. Remain very much
on your guard”. The message was sent to the territorial commanders in
Friesland, Overijssel and southern Limburg, the Commander of the Field
Army, the Commander of the Air Defence and the commanders of the
Den Helder Position, Fortress Holland and the Commander in Zeeland,
as well as the commanders of the IInd, IIIrd and IVth Corps.��
��
All command-
ers were to decide for themselves what measures to take.
After 22.00 hrs, Winkelman and Dijxhoorn held a meeting, in which
they discussed placing obstacles east of the Maas and the IJssel.��
An
��
or-
der to that effect was issued via the Commander of the Field Army to the
Commander of the IIIrd Corps.��
��
At 23.15 hrs, the troops tasked with stra-
tegic security were ordered to effect full readiness by 03.00 hrs on 10 May.
Never before since the proclamation of the mobilisation had such drastic
measures been taken.
At around midnight, a confident Winkelman left his headquarters at
Lange Voorhout 7 in The Hague. In passing, he said to Lieutenant Colonel
J.G.M. van der Plassche, Head of the Foreign Intelligence Division: “The
gentlemen can come now, we have done everything we can. I’m going
home now to grab a few hours’ sleep”.34 Less than four hours later, the first
German troops set foot on Dutch territory.
Quoted in: M. van Blankenstein, “De raadselachtige dienst”, De stem van Nederland,
34 ��
��
(19 July 1946) 21.
Broad outline of the organisation of the

Royal Netherlands Army in May 1940
The composition of the Royal Netherlands Army in May 1940 was based
on the wartime organisation as laid down in 1933 in the manual entitled
Samenstelling van de Koninklijke Landmacht op voet van oorlog [Com-
position of the Royal Netherlands Army on a war footing] (The Hague,
1933). On that basis, the strength of the army fell roughly into two groups,
namely the troops which belonged to the Field Army and those which
did not. Organically, the Field Army consisted of the Ist Corps, IInd Corps,
IIIrd Corps, IVth Corps, the Light Division and the Army Troops and field
trains; the 2nd Aviation Regiment was also assigned for the purposes of
air reconnaissance. The troops outside the Field Army were intended
for the territorial defence and for the lines and positions which were not
to be occupied by the Field Army. Following the announcement of the
general mobilisation of the armed forces on 28 August 1939, the army
took up its war positions in accordance with ‘Concentration Blue’. For this,
it was necessary to deviate from the organic composition of various large
units. The way in which the command relationships were consequently
arranged on 9 May 1940 and, following the developments on the first
day of war, in the evening of 10 May can be found in the organisational
diagrams elsewhere in this book.
A corps (approximately 25,000 men) consisted of two divisions
(approximately 10,000 men each) and corps troops. A division comprised
a staff, a pioneer company, two machine-gun companies, an antitank
company, an anti-aircraft machine-gun company, an anti-aircraft artil-
lery battery, three infantry regiments and an artillery regiment.��
��
An infan-
try regiment was made up of a staff, a mortar company (six mortars), a
6-Veld field-gun battery (four pieces), an anti-tank company (six pieces)
and three infantry battalions. It numbered approximately 2,500 men. The
infantry battalion was composed as follows: a battalion staff, three com-
panies of riflemen and a machine-gun company. The strength amounted
to some 750 men on average and a riflemen company usually numbered
approximately 160. Each artillery regiment in principle consisted of three
battalions of three batteries, and each battery had four guns.
In the spring of 1940, the light troops in the Corps and in the Light
Division were involved in a large-scale reorganisation, which had not
yet been fully completed on 10 May 1940. As a consequence, when the
fighting started, the Light Division consisted of a staff, a signals squadron,
two armoured-vehicle squadrons, a machine-gun squadron, two hussars-
88 chapter three
motorcyclist regiments, two cyclist regiments, the Mobile Artillery Corps

and a division train.��
Because
��
of various command arrangements, how-
ever, in terms of combat units the commander only had the 2nd Hussars-
Motorcyclist Regiment, the two cyclist regiments and the Mobile Artillery
Corps.
Broadly speaking, the following figures apply with regard to unit strength:
• corps – approximately 25,000 men
• division – approximately 10,000 men
• infantry regiment – approximately 2,500 men
• infantry battalion – approximately 750 men
• riflemen company – approximately 160 men
• infantry section – approximately 30 men
On 10 May 1940, the total strength of the Royal Netherlands Army
amounted to approximately 280,000 men. Of these, after the various
changes in the command relationships, some 120,000 men were under
the command of the Commander of the Field Army in the evening of 10
May.
CHAPTER FOUR
THE GATHERING STORM: THE GERMAN ARMED FORCES

IN THE INTERWAR PERIOD
Introduction
When Germany invaded Poland on 1 September 1939, its army numbered

2,758,000 men and was organised into 103 divisions, 53 of which, includ-
ing 6 armoured divisions, had already belonged to the active peacetime
army.1 This strong army bore hardly any resemblance to the army of the
Weimar Republic, which in 1933, according to the Chef des Truppenamtes,
General Wilhelm Adam, would only have been able to withstand two
weeks at most of any military conflict. Had it been invaded by France, all
it would have been able to do was “inflict a few pinpricks here and there”.2
The weakness of the Reichswehr, as the army of the Weimar Republic was
known, was due to the stipulations of the Treaty of Versailles. Article 231,
for example, stated that Germany and its allies were wholly responsible
for the outbreak of the First World War. One of the consequences of this
Kriegsschuldartikel was that a number of restrictions were imposed on the
Weimar Republic in terms of the structure and size of its armed forces,
with a view to preventing any more German military operations. Germa-
ny was, for instance, not permitted to have tanks or heavy guns, could not
have an air force and the size of the German navy was severely restricted:
large warships and submarines were forbidden and the personnel comple-
ment was not allowed to exceed 15,000.
There were also stringent restrictions on the number of personnel in
the Reichswehr. It was not to exceed 100,000: 4,000 officers and 96,000
NCOs and other ranks, and Germany had to abolish its conscription leg-
islation. The organisation of the Reichswehr was thus simple: under the
1 B. Mueller-Hillebrand, Das Heer 1933-1945. Entwicklung des organisatorischen

Aufbaues. Band I. Das Heer bis zum Kriegsbeginn (Darmstadt, 1954) 65 ff.
2 Wilhelm Deist, “Die Aufrüstung der Wehrmacht” in: Wilhelm Deist e.a., Das
deutsche Reich und der zweite Weltkrieg. Band I. Ursachen und Voraussetzungen der
deutschen Kriegspolitik (Stuttgart, 1979) 400-401.
90 chapter four
Between the autumn

of 1934 and September
1939, the German
army increased in
number from some
250,000 to 2,758,000.
Presentations of colours
by Hitler himself served
to enhance the bond
between the Führer and
the army. Photograph
taken in autumn 1936.
Reichswehrminister and the Chef der Heeresleitung were two Reichswehr-

gruppenkommandos, one in Berlin and one in Kassel. These Kommandos
contained the army’s seven infantry and three cavalry divisions. The task
of these divisions was, according to Article 160 of the Treaty of Versailles,
to “be devoted exclusively to the maintenance of order within the territory
and to the control of the frontiers”. The Reichswehr had no general staff, nor
a Kriegsakademie for training general staff officers. The allies would not al-
low Germany to have such an organisation, given the part that those par-
ticular officers had played in the First World War. The advanced training
for officers was, therefore, decentralised and was provided by the Führerge-
hilfelehrgänge in the Wehrkreise, into which the Reichswehrgruppenkom-
mandos were divided. The idea was thus to prevent a situation in which
training was given to an exclusive and homogenous corps of staff officers.
Because of the high levels of unemployment in Germany after 1918, a
great many Germans aspired to a position of officer or lower rank in the
the gathering storm 91
Reichswehr. Selection criteria were thus stringent, one of them being the
way in which the candidates had performed during the First World War.
For the officers’ positions in particular, veterans from the former German
army were selected. Their political views were mainly right-wing. Recruit-
ment of the rank and file occurred, as had generally been the case in the
past, mainly in the countryside, where the population was nationalistic
and conservative. This meant that the Reichswehr could certainly not be
said to reflect German society.
The first Chef der Heeresleitung was Generalmajor Walther Reinhardt.
The Chef des Truppenamtes, Generalmajor Hans von Seeckt, should, how-
ever, be regarded as the founder of the Reichswehr. The Truppenamt was
in effect the continuation of the forbidden general staff. It was made up
of sixty officers and its activities were virtually the same as those of the
former general staff. In 1920, Hans von Seeckt was appointed Chef der
Heeresleitung, a post which he was to hold until 1926. As early as January
1921, Von Seeckt made it clear that he saw it as his duty to make the Reichs-
wehr the basis for the future expansion of the German army, with the aim of
regaining Germany’s status as a great power. He therefore called his crea-
tion the Führerheer and was willing to circumvent the stipulations of the
Treaty of Versailles.3 German engineers from Krupp, for example, went to
Bofors in Sweden, where they developed what was to become the Second
World War’s famous 88mm Flak (Fliegerabwehrkanone). Also, with the
aid of all kinds of umbrella organisations, such as Aerosport GmbH and
the Deutsche Versuchsanstalt für Luftfahrt, pilots were trained and prepa-
rations were made to allow a German air force to be established quickly
when the time came.
It was for this purpose that a secret treaty concerning mutual support
was signed with the Soviet Union in Rapallo in 1922. Germany would
provide the Soviet Union with technicians to help to build up the Rus-
sian industry and train Russian officers. In return, the Soviet Union was to
supply ammunition and other armaments to Germany. The Soviet Union
also allowed Germany to use its territory to conduct tank exercises and
experiments with war gases. During the ten years that this cooperation
lasted, three hundred German pilots were trained in the Soviet Union.
In 1925, amid the deepest secrecy, the Truppenamt drew up the initial
plans for an expansion of the Reichswehr. Inextricably linked to this was
3 Rainer Wohlfeil, “Heer und Republik” in: Edgar Graf von Matuschka and Rainer
Wohlfeil, Reichswehr und Republik (1918-1933) (Frankfurt am Main, 1970) 207. For the
build-up of the German army after the First World War, see also: K.-V. Neugebauer, ed.,
Grundzüge der deutschen Militärgeschichte (2 vol; Freiburg, 1993) Band I, Historischer Über-
blick, 272-294 and 300-309.
92 chapter four
the reinforcement of the Reichswehr’s materiel. The driving force behind

the plans was Von Seeckt’s successor as Chef der Heeresleitung, General-
leutnant Wilhelm Heye, who took up the appointment in October 1926.
In February 1927, Heye informed Reichskanzler Wilhelm Marx’s cabi-
net about the secret build-up of the Reichswehr. The Marx government
proved willing to support the covert build-up of arms and developed a
system which enabled funds to be made available to the Reichswehrmi-
nisterium without involving Parliament.4 Heye found himself facing major
problems, however, when it came to the supply of ammunition. The Ger-
man industry indeed did its utmost to meet the demand, but the result of
the rearmament was limited nonetheless.
As well as the rearmament, the Reichswehr also devoted a great deal of
attention to the development of military doctrine. The operations of the
First World War were studied and analysed, with the focus more on the
future than on the past. The First World War, with its futile trench war-
fare, had demonstrated the need to end any subsequent war by means of
a brief, decisive campaign. One of the first results of these analyses was
the issue of the manual entitled Führung und Gefecht der verbundenen
Waffen, which was published in 1921. This manual not only looked at the
command process and the decision-making, but also organised the coop-
eration between the infantry, artillery, cavalry, engineers and the support
services. Elaborating on the German military doctrines of the nineteenth
century, the central tenets were the assault and the victory blow.
It is the attack alone which dictates to the enemy.��
The
��
superiority of com-
mander and unit is shown to the best advantage in that.��
��
Particularly effec-
tive is the envelopment of one or both wings and an attack on the enemy’s
rear. The enemy can thus be eliminated. All orders pertaining to the attack
must bear the hallmark of the greatest possible resolve.��
The
��
will of the com-
mander to achieve victory must be clear down to the last man.5
This view was reflected in the tactical commands. The orders in these
commands were always highly specific. For example, attacks had to be
“ruthless, without delay and under total concentration of strength”. This
aggressive language became the norm for the spoken and written lan-
guage of the German armed forces.
If an attack were to be successful, it had to have a clear point of main
effort. That main effort was formed by a concentration of troops, which
also meant a concentration of fire power. A major difficulty in this respect
4 Deist, “Aufrüstung der Wehrmacht”, 378.

5 Heinz-Ludger Borgert, Handbuch zur deutschen Militärgeschichte 1648-1939. Band
IX. Grundzüge der militärischen Kriegsführung (Munich, 1979) 543.
was that, in war, nothing was ever certain. The weather conditions or the
state of the terrain could, for instance, be unpredictable, and the enemy
could react in a way that was not expected. It was, therefore, considered
necessary to be able to shift the point of main effort during a military
operation. To make this possible, considerable freedom of action at all
command levels was essential. The proviso was, however, that the com-
manders involved had clear sight of the end objective and all acted in ac-
cordance with the same procedures, which were laid down in the regula-
tions. The manual was to remain a means at all times and was never to
become an aim in itself. Blind obedience or rigid discipline thus had no
place in the Reichswehr.
Seen schematically, all levels of the Reichswehr’s command system were
in theory as follows: upon receiving a command or order, an assessment
of the situation was made. This assessment took into account all sorts of
factors, such as the weather, the terrain and the strength of friendly and
enemy troops. This assessment led to a decision which would form the
basis for new orders. If no new orders were forthcoming, units would for-
mulate their own mission within the framework of the general objective
and get to work. The manual on Führung und Gefecht der verbundenen
Waffen was also elaborated in 1923 with a second part, which was intend-
ed for a future army that was no longer subject to the restrictive stipula-
tions of the Treaty of Versailles.
The German rearmament
At the end of the 1920s, there was a prevailing opinion in German military
circles that the complete helplessness should be brought to an end as soon
as possible. Not that the country had aggressive intentions, but the pres-
ence of a German military force was needed to deter neighbouring coun-
tries from attacking Germany. Around 1930, the Weimar Republic would
still have been utterly helpless in military terms against any attack by a for-
eign power. This was illustrated particularly in the many Kriegsspiele which
were conducted at the end of the 1920s under the leadership of the Chef
des Truppenamtes, Generalmajor Werner von Blomberg. It turned out that
a war with Poland, for example, could be fought “only for a short time and
with the loss of more German territory”.6 This helplessness was again re-
ferred to by the new Chef des Truppenamtes, General Adam, in 1933 in no
uncertain terms: “We cannot fight a war at the moment. We must do all we
6 Deist, “Aufrüstung der Wehrmacht”, 385-387.

Part of the German rearmament was the build-up of the tank arm. This photograph
shows the production of the Panzerkampfwagen III, a model that was introduced
into the units from 1936.
A heavy 15cm field howitzer is put in position. This modern weapon was introduced
after Germany had decided that it would no longer respect the restrictive stipulations of
the Treaty of Versailles.
can to avoid it, even at the cost of a diplomatic defeat.”7 It seemed to be a

proposal for some sort of German appeasement policy.
In April 1930, Reichswehrminister Wilhelm Groener issued the Wei-
sung entitled “Die Aufgaben der Wehrmacht”. In order to prevent neigh-
bouring countries from invading Germany, the Reichswehr, according to
Groener, would have to be three times its current size. Twenty-one infan-
try divisions had to be formed and armed with heavy artillery and other
modern weapons. This reinforcement of the Reichswehr, however, had to
take place “within the parameters of the possibilities in terms of equip-
ment and supplies”. Expectations were, therefore, that it would not be un-
til 1938 that these divisions would be supplied with weapons, ammuni-
tion and other equipment. In 1933, the new Reichskanzler, Adolf Hitler,
made it clear in various speeches that his aim was to put an end to Ger-
many’s military impotence. A definitive step towards the rearmament was
the withdrawal from the League of Nations and the Disarmament Con-
ference in October 1933. In December 1933, Hitler then decided to set
up a 300,000-strong Friedensheer. This army was to form the basis for a
Kriegsheer which would be capable of conducting “a defensive war on sev-
eral fronts with some prospect of success”. This would, of course, only be
achieved with the reintroduction of conscription.
As a basis for setting up the wartime army, consideration is being given to a
peacetime army consisting of 21 divisions (300,000 men), whereby an active
conscription period of one year will apply for most of the military person-
nel. General conscription should be introduced with effect from 1 October
1934.8
The Chef des Truppenamtes, Generalleutnant Ludwig Beck, urged caution.

Too rapid an expansion of the Reichswehr would have an adverse effect on
the quality of the troops. In May 1934, he wrote:
In terms of national politics, it is not right that an army that has been
formed so rapidly as an instrument of power for the state should have more
value than an army that is two-thirds or half the size, but was built up by
solid labour.��
��
The core of the existing professional army that will be incorpo-
rated in this will lose its striking power for good. I would rather rely on 10
people who are secure than on 50 people who are not.9
7 Walter Bernhardt, Die deutsche Aufrüstung 1934-1939. Militärische und politische

Konzeptionen und ihre Einschätzung durch die Alliierten (Frankfurt am Main, 1969) 35.
8 “Denkschrift des Truppenamtes in der Heeresleitung vom 14.12.1933 über den
Aufbau des künftigen Friedensheeres” in: Hans-Jürgen Rautenberg, “Drei Dokumente zur
Planung eines 300.000 Mann-Friedensheeres aus dem Dezember 1933”, Militärgeschichtli-
che Mitteilungen, XXII (1977) 115.
9 Bernhardt, Die deutsche Aufrüstung, 70.
96 chapter four
The required 21,000 officers, 7% of the total strength of the Friedensheer,

could be recruited from the officer corps of the Bereitschaftspolizei and
from the circle of former officers who had served in the First World War.
A particular problem was caused by the low birth rate during the war
years, which meant that the intakes were too small to meet the demand.
In the autumn of 1934, the strength of the Reichswehr had nonetheless
risen to over 250,000.
Another problem was posed by the “attempts by the SA to form its
own army”.10 In the spring of 1934, those within the Reichswehrministe-
rium foresaw that it would be impossible to deactivate the SA by peace-
ful means, and so from March onwards they worked with Heinrich
Himmler’s Schutzstaffel (SS), which was supplied with weapons, ammuni-
tion and accommodation. The killing of the leader of the SA, Ernst Röhm,
on 30 June 1934, along with a number of his colleagues, indeed signified
the end of the SA, but that did not give the Reichswehr a monopoly in
terms of defence and security. It was, after all, Himmler’s SS which had
proved indispensable for Hitler.
After 1933, the SS developed into a complex organisation. Firstly, there
was the Allgemeine SS, a basic organisation comprising members who
only served in the SS in their free time; by the end of 1938, they num-
bered 215,000. They saw themselves as the ideologically pure vanguard of
National Socialism. The Allgemeine SS did not, however, have any great
political significance. More important was the fact that Himmler had al-
ready managed to give the SS virtually total control of the police force in
1934. A major part of the SS was the Ic-Dienst, later to become the Sicher-
heitsdienst (SD), a multi-faceted intelligence service, which supplied the
information that formed the basis for the work of the dreaded Gestapo.
In 1933, Joseph (‘Sepp’) Dietrich had formed a military sub-organisa-
tion within the SS to serve as Hitler’s personal bodyguard. This regiment
was aptly named Leibstandarte ‘Adolf Hitler’. More of these SS groups were
soon set up, most of which were equipped with weapons and put into bar-
racks. A number of these produced the SS Totenkopfverbände, which were
responsible for guarding the concentration camps.
The SS regiments ‘Adolf Hitler’, ‘Germania’ and ‘Deutschland’ together
formed the SS Verfügungstruppe, a small army which was at Hitler’s person-
al disposal. After the Anschluβ, a fourth regiment was formed in Vienna:
the SS regiment ‘Der Führer’. From the end of 1939 onwards, all armed SS
units–Totenkopfverbände and Verfügungstruppe–were known by the name
10 ��
“Niederschrift
��
über die Besprechungen im Reichswehr-ministerium am 20. und
21.12.1933 zum Aufbau des 300.000-Mann-Heeres” in: Rautenberg, “Drei Dokumente”, 119.
Waffen SS. The SS Totenkopfverbände were relieved of their surveillance task

in 1939 and were fully incorporated in the Waffen SS two years later.
The military value of these armed SS units was initially extremely lim-
ited. They had a flawless command of the goose-step, but apart from that
they had barely progressed beyond a mentality of mob violence. It was for
that reason that the SS leaders decided in 1934 to recruit ex-career offic-
ers, who would turn these fanatic street fighters into reliable, professional
soldiers. The SS Verfügungstruppe would, however, never become an ‘ordi-
nary’ military unit, mainly because some of these ex-career officers used it
to experiment with modern ideas, such as
(…) the commander of the second SS regiment, ‘Deutschland’, former cap-
tain Felix Steiner, who had a considerable influence on the training of the
entire Verfügungstruppe. Based on his experiences in the First World War,
Steiner (...) believed in an elite army of small, rapid shock forces, made up of
extremely well-trained, all-round soldiers.11
So what did the future hold for the Waffen SS? Should they remain a police
force first and foremost, perhaps to be deployed against the Wehrmacht
in the event that the army should prove politically unreliable, or should
they be expanded to form a second large force, independent of the Wehr-
macht? The question remained unclear for a long time. Hitler had indeed
ordered improvements to the personnel and equipment of the SS Verfü-
gungstruppe on 25 May 1939, thus securing the place of the SS troops as
the second Waffenträger der Nation, but he still resisted Himmler’s fervent
desire to expand the Waffen SS. It was not until 1942 that he gave in and
even started to encourage the expansion.
How should the combat value of the SS units which were deployed in
the Netherlands in May 1940 be assessed? They coupled aspirations to
an elite status and a strong desire to prove themselves on the battlefield
with poor military training and minimal combat experience. They were
angriffsfreudige, physically strong and well-armed volunteers who were
not hindered by too much knowledge of battle. The Oberbefehlshaber der
Heeresgruppe B, Generaloberst Fedor von Bock, remarked in April 1940:
“The combat training for NCOs and men of the SS is inadequate; that’s
going to cost a lot of blood! What a waste of fine human material!”12
N.K.C.A. in ’t Veld, De SS en Nederland. Documenten uit SS-archieven 1935-1945.
11 ��
��
Deel 1. Inleiding/documenten 1935-1942 (The Hague, 1976) 48.
12 ��
��
Bernhard R. Kroener, “Die personellen Ressourcen des dritten Reiches im Span-
nungsfeld zwischen Wehrmacht, Bürokratie und Kriegswirtschaft 1939-1942” in: Bern-
hard R. Kroener, Rolf-Dieter Müller en Hans Umbreit, Das deutsche Reich und der zweite
Weltkrieg. Band 5. Erster Halbband. Kriegsverwaltung, Wirtschaft und personelle Ressourcen
1939-1941 (Stuttgart, 1988) 832.
98 chapter four
The German troops

who invaded the
Netherlands and
Belgium used a phrase
book. It was clear from
many of the phrases
that the Germans
were counting on the
presence of French
troops.
Back to the German rearmament. Until the referendum on the future

of Saarland that was held on 1 March 1935, much restraint was exercised
in public on this matter. After that, however, Hitler, who had become the
commander-in-chief of the German armed forces after the death of Presi-
dent Paul von Hindenburg in 1934, announced far-reaching measures.
He declared, for instance, during a speech on 16 March 1935, that he no
longer felt bound by the stipulations of the Treaty of Versailles and would
reintroduce general conscription that same day. The German army leader-
ship were now able to speed up the expansion of the army.
True to form, soon after the announcement of the introduction of con-
scription, the Truppenamt was renamed the Generalstab des Heeres and
in Berlin the Kriegsakademie opened its doors once again. Generalleut-
nant Beck had drawn up new armament plans in the meantime. The idea
was to create a Friedensheer strong enough to allow the mobilisation of
a Kriegsheer that would actually be able to implement a multifront strat-
egy. Such a Kriegsheer would need to have 63 infantry, 3 cavalry and 3 ar-
moured divisions. The previously planned Friedensheer made up of 21 in-
fantry divisions would no longer suffice. It was for this reason that in the
“Act pertaining to the build-up of the Wehrmacht” in March 1935, Hitler
presented a future Friedensheer of 36 divisions.
Hitler’s wishes presented the leaders of the Reichswehr with major
problems. In March 1935, the Reichswehrführung did indeed have 21 di-
visions, but they had not yet reached full strength. Some 280,000 men
were under arms, but no more than 109 of the 189 infantry battalions
were combat-ready, while the two armoured battalions only had twelve
Panzerkampfwagen.13 The Chef der Heeresleitung, General Werner Freiherr
von Fritsch, nonetheless decided on 2 April that 24 entire divisions had to
be combat-ready by the autumn of 1935. To this end, the 56,000 person-
nel who made up the barracked Landespolizei were incorporated in the
army. This improved the quality of the army, as the Landespolizei consist-
ed mainly of NCOs and lower ranks who already had long careers behind
them. In the autumn of 1935, the German army reached a strength of ap-
proximately 400,000, which meant that the personnel complement had
quadrupled in two and a half years.
On 7 March 1936, German troops marched into the Rhineland, the
first offensive action by the newly-formed Wehrmacht. The political suc-
cess of this action led to Hitler’s decision in August 1936 to involve the
entire German economy in the rearmament. The aim was now to create a
2,421,000-strong army by 1 September 1939, although the German army
leaders did not expect the expansion to be complete until 1942 or 1943.
Things did not proceed without dispute, of course. In particular, the plans
of the Inspektor der Kraftfahrtruppen, Generalmajor Oswald Lutz, and his
chief of staff, Oberst Heinz Guderian, to make the armoured divisions the
main operational unit of the German army met with a great deal of resist-
ance, certainly from the side of the traditional cavalry, which felt that its
very existence was under threat. Hitler was, however, receptive to uncon-
ventional ideas and he thus made sure that the mass production of Pan-
zer I began in the winter of 1934-1935. Beck, too, allowed himself to be
swayed. Without the deployment of armoured units, any attack against an
enemy of equal numbers had no chance of success. He decided, therefore,
that each corps should have a Panzer brigade. For the armoured units,
Beck also foresaw “an independent operational deployment in conjunc-
tion with other motorised arms (currently armoured division).”14
13 ��
Deist,
��
“Aufrüstung der Wehrmacht”, 418.
14 �Ibidem, 429.
100 chapter four
German infantryman
with the MG-34 light
machine gun.
Despite this technological modernisation, Generalleutnant Beck still

considered the most important factor in the war organisation to be the
human element. The Truppenführung manual, most of which he himself
had written, stated:
Despite technology, the value of the man is the crucial factor; his impor-
tance has grown because of dispersed battles. ��
The emptiness of the battle-
field demands fighters who can think and act independently, who exploit
each situation with forethought, resolve and courage, filled with the convic-
tion that it is up to each and every man to ensure success.15
The build-up of the Luftwaffe was the most spectacular part of the Ger-
man rearmament in the 1930s. From three Reklamestaffeln in 1933, the
German air force grew to a strength of 4,093 deployable aircraft in 1939.
15 �Truppenführung. I. Teil (Abschnitt I-XIII) (Berlin, 1936) 3.

During the same period, the air force also developed more and more as an
independent Service.16
In 1933, the German air force was still only regarded as a supporting
unit for the army and the navy. But this started to change immediately
after Hitler’s appointment as Reichskanzler in 1933. This became particu-
larly apparent with the appointment of the influential National Socialist
Hermann Göring as Reichskommissar für die Luftfahrt. Erhard Milch, who
as state secretary took on the day-to-day management of Göring’s office,
thus declared on 30 January 1933 that it was his intention to incorporate
the entire air force, both military and civilian, in a Reichsluftfahrtministe-
rium. As early as 10 May of that same year, the founding of this ministry
became a fact.
State Secretary Milch immediately set to work on the build-up of the
Luftwaffe. The director of Lufthansa, Robert Knauss, was the first to come
up with proposals. Just as Admiral Alfred von Tirpitz had wanted for the
navy at the end of the nineteenth century, Knauss wanted to see a Risiko-
Luftwaffe, which would be such a powerful deterrent that not a single
country would entertain the thought of attacking Germany. Milch real-
ised, however, that Germany’s small aviation industry was not capable of
implementing a programme such as this. Nonetheless, the construction
of heavy bombers was the key element of the first armament plans for the
Luftwaffe. This would enable Germany to carry out heavy aerial bombard-
ments to strike an aggressor deep in his own territory.
On 1 July 1934, the Reichsluftfahrtministerium presented an extensive
construction programme, which envisaged for 1938 a total Luftwaffe com-
plement of 6,671 deployable aircraft: 2,225 fighter planes, 2,188 bombers,
699 dive bombers and 1,559 reconnaissance planes. Göring made sure
that the necessary funds were available. This, of course, meant a huge
stimulus for the German aviation industry, which still only employed
4,000 personnel in 1933. The aircraft factories Junkers in Dessau, Hein-
kel in Warnemünde, Dornier in Friedrichshafen and the Bayerischen
Flugzeugwerke in Augsburg expanded enormously. In October 1938,
there were thus 204,100 people employed in the aviation industry.
The programme ultimately proved too ambitious, despite the personal
intervention of the Chef des Luftkommandoamtes, Oberst Walter We-
ver, who as early as May 1934 instructed Junkers and Dornier to design
a four-engined bomber. The aims of the 1934 programme could not be
On the build-up of the Luftwaffe, see in particular: Karl Köhler and Karl-Heinz
16 ��
��
Hummel, “Die Organisation der Luftwaffe 1933-1939” in: Wehrmacht und Nationalsozialis-
mus 1933-1939 (Munich, 1978) 501-579.
Fabric with a camouflage pattern is displayed in the government clothing store in Berlin.
German infantry cross a water obstacle with the aid of a float containing their clothing
and equipment. The pack, referred to in the regulations as Zeltbahnbündel,
was made by using half of a tent.
realised and immediately after the death of Wever in 1936, Göring inter-
vened. He appointed Generalleutnant Albert Kesselring as the new Chef
des Luftkommandoamtes and Ernst Udet, until then the Oberst Inspektor
der Jagd- und Sturzkampfflieger, as the Chef des Technischen Amtes. What
was startling was that the Kriegsspiel “Wehrmachtstudie 1935/36”, a gen-
eral staff exercise on paper, revealed that the Luftwaffe would not be ca-
pable of taking out the French air force. The conclusion was that “the
German air arsenal (...) was wholly inadequate”.17 The leadership of the
Reichsluftfahrtministerium concentrated, therefore, on developing a Luft-
waffe which would be able to provide sufficient support for the army. This
meant that the German air force became a primarily tactical air force, in
which fighter planes, medium bombers and dive bombers were extremely
important. In May 1940, for example, compared to 1,120 bombers of the
types Dornier Do-17, Heinkel He-111 and Junkers Ju-88, there were 342
Junkers Ju-87 dive bombers and 1,264 Messerschmitt Me-109 and Me-110
fighter planes. These German aircraft had too limited a radius of action to
provide effective support for naval warfare.18
A major problem in the build-up of the Luftwaffe was the recruitment
of personnel. In 1933, von Blomberg decided that the officer corps should
consist of an “elite corps with the most unbridled desire to fight”.19 For
this, the army was obliged to relinquish some of its best people. But the
civil aviation industry also lost many personnel to the burgeoning air
force. In August 1939, the Luftwaffe was ultimately to comprise 15,000 of-
ficers and 370,000 NCOs and other ranks.20
The rearmament of the German navy initially proceeded at a slower
and more controlled pace than that of the Luftwaffe and the army. On 18
June 1935, a naval treaty was signed with Britain, which stipulated that
the German war fleet must not exceed 35% of the tonnage of British naval
forces. This did not, however, apply to submarines, of which Germany was
allowed to have as many as Britain. Because of this, the major expansion
of the German navy did not get under way until 1938. The German navy
commanders expected that in 1944 the establishment of a war fleet would
be so advanced that they would have nothing to fear from Britain or any
other naval power.
17 ��
Deist,
��
Karl-Heinz Völker, “Die deutsche Luftwaffe September 1939 bis Juni 1940”, Wehr-
18 ��
��
wissenschaftliche Rundschau, XXVII (1978) 196. J. Buckley, Air Power in the Age of Total
War (London, 1999) 82-86.
19 ��
Deist,
��
Karl-Heinz Völker, Die deutsche Luftwaffe 1933-1939. Aufbau, Führung und Rüstung
20 ��
��
der Luftwaffe sowie die Entwicklung der deutschen Luftkriegstheorie (Stuttgart, 1967) 183.
The signing of the Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact on 23 August 1939 sealed the fate of Poland.
German command structure May 1940
Oberster
Befehlshaber
der Wehrmacht
The Oberkommando der Wehrmacht under
the command of Generaloberst Wilhelm
Oberkommando
Keitel is the staff of the Oberster Befehls-
der Wehrmacht
haber der Wehrmacht, Adolf Hitler.
Oberbefehlshaber Oberbefehlshaber
der Kriegsmarine der Luftwaffe
XXXX
Marinegruppe Marinegruppe 1
U - Boote
West Ost 2
3
4
5
The Oberkommando des Heeres, under Oberbefehlshaber

des Heeres
the command of General Franz Halder,
is the staff of the Oberbefehlshaber des
Heeres, Generaloberst Walther von Oberkommando
Brauchitsch. Keitel and Halder command des Heeres
only these two staffs and have no authority
over the units that come under the Oberste
XXXXX XXXXX XXXXX
Befehlshaber der Wehrmacht or Ober-
befehlshaber des Heeres. C A B
The more the German rearmament began to take shape, the more atten-
tion was devoted to a possible future war and the necessary operation
plans. For the German army leadership, there were two key considera-
tions. Firstly, because of the lack of raw materials, Germany would only be
able to wage a short war. Then there was the problem of a potential dual-
front war. Since the Franco-German war (1870-1871), the German gener-
al staff had been taking account of this in the formulation of their opera-
tion plans. The main principle that they adopted was that the opponents
attacking from two sides had to be defeated one after the other. While one
front acted defensively, the other had to attack. In the 1930s, the army
trod very carefully in the footsteps of its predecessors in the preparation
of its operation plans. That meant that any opponents in mobile warfare
had to be defeated quickly. Tanks and aircraft were regarded as important
tools in this respect. Because of the use of these new assets, the German
warfighting method later became known as Blitzkrieg. These were, how-
ever, such traditional operation plans that they once again sought to find
an answer to Germany’s classic problem of the dual-front war.
By 1937, the German army had progressed to such an extent that it was
able to hold its first major exercise. Because of the German territorial ex-
pansion in 1938, the rearmament was stepped up another gear and Hitler
started to get involved in the military affairs. During the Sudeten crisis
in 1938, the German army had 48 divisions. For the Chief of the Gen-
eral Staff, Generaloberst Ludwig Beck, the Sudeten issue was actually the
last straw. He felt that Hitler’s foreign policy was not in keeping with the
available military means and he resigned. Beck, who was later to emerge
as one of the key figures of the German resistance against Hitler, was suc-
ceeded by General der Artillerie Franz Halder. Other senior officers, such
as von Blomberg and von Fritsch, also had to step down.
In September 1939, the thus purged German army stood virtually as
one behind Hitler and his war politics. This army, which had a modern
vanguard in the form of motorised and mechanised divisions, was set up
at breakneck speed after 1933, which meant that the rearmament targets
were constantly raised. All this was only possible, however, because of the
efforts of the Reichswehr leaders, who had been doing their utmost since
the mid-1920s to recreate a strong German army. Hitler’s accession to
power merely served to provide the German army leadership with greater
opportunities to achieve this goal.
106 chapter four
Baptism of fire
Up until the military occupation of the whole of Czechoslovakia, Hitler

had managed to avoid a situation in which the territorial expansions of
the Third Reich would lead led to a general European military conflict.
France and Britain had had enough, however, and on 31 March 1939
they signed a guarantee of military support for Poland, which looked as
if it might become the next victim. When Hitler ordered the Wehrmacht
to invade Poland on 1 September 1939, France and Britain therefore re-
sponded two days later by declaring war on the Third Reich. The Second
World War had begun. The German people were largely aware that dif-
ficult times lay ahead and they were resigned and none too enthusiastic
in their response to this latest move by the Führer. Weisung Nr. 1 für die
Kriegführung, which Hitler published at the beginning of the Poland cam-
paign, stated explicitly:
Now that all the political possibilities of resolving what has for Germany be-
come an untenable situation on its eastern border have been exhausted, I
have decided to opt for a solution involving the use of force.21
The way in which the war in Poland had to be conducted had been set out
by Hitler in Weisung “Fall Weiss” on 3 April 1939. The aim was to invade Po-
land by surprise and to destroy the Polish armed forces in a brief campaign.
For the German army leadership, the outbreak of war came too soon,
certainly now that it looked as if war would also have to be waged on
France and Britain very soon. The strategic situation bore a dangerously
close resemblance to that of the unsuccessful First World War. Germany
ran the risk of once again having to fight a prolonged dual-front war in
Europe, while being cut off from the raw materials on the world market by
a naval blockade. Although Germany had signed a Treaty of Non-Aggres-
sion with the Soviet Union on 23 August 1939, the Von Ribbentrop-Mo-
lotov Pact, it was unclear how long that would hold good, given Hitler’s
expansion plans in the east. The military side, too, left much to be desired.
The build-up of the army was not complete, neither in terms of materiel
nor personnel, and the level of proficiency of the troops—the length of
service for conscripts was by then two years on average—was inadequate.
Compared to the Polish forces, however, the Wehrmacht was vastly supe-
rior in terms of personnel and materiel. Including all the reserve units,
21 � Weisung Nr. 1 für die Kriegführung in: Walther Hubatsch, Hitlers Weisungen für die
Kriegführung 1939-1945. Dokumente des Oberkommandos der Wehrmacht. (2nd ed.; Ko-
blenz, 1983) 19.
German soldiers
meet in the north of
the Polish Corridor,
south-west of Danzig,
on 11 September
1939 (right);
Oberbefehlshaber
des Heeres, General-
oberst Walther von
Brauchitsch, on 9
September 1939,
during the Polish
campaign (below).
108 chapter four
the German offensive army consisted of 15 Panzer and motorised infantry

divisions. In addition, 37 ordinary infantry divisions were deployed. The
German forces also had 3,600 armoured vehicles and 1,929 aircraft. In the
west, the German army remained safely behind the Westwall, the German
defence line along the western bank of the Rhine. It was here that General-
oberst Wilhelm Ritter von Leeb used 12 well-equipped and well-trained
divisions and 32 more poorly equipped and trained ones to conduct the
strategic defensive. It was not made very difficult for him, however, as the
vast majority of the French stayed safely behind their Maginot Line. The
German army leadership were able to concentrate all their attention on
the fighting in Poland.
Poland had lost this war before it even began. It was surrounded by
German forces on three sides: to the west by those in Germany itself, to
the south by those in German-occupied Slovakia and to the north by
those in German East Prussia. Lastly, the eastern border was threatened
by the Red Army of the Soviet Union. Faced with this threat, the Polish
high command positioned the forces in an all-round defence along the
borders. They were thus widely dispersed and would for that reason alone
be outnumbered wherever the Germans concentrated their point of main
effort. But the Polish army was even smaller than the German attack
force. The Poles deployed 37 infantry divisions and 750 armoured vehi-
cles, supported by 900 aircraft. They did have 11 mounted brigades, while
the Germans only had one such brigade. However, this advantage had no
significance whatsoever, as these units were in effect no longer suitable for
modern warfare.
The German attack on Poland was carried out by two army groups.
Army Group South attacked from the south, under the command of
Generaloberst Gerd von Rundstedt. The other army group, Army Group
North, was under the command of Generaloberst Fedor von Bock. They
attacked from the north. Together, the two army groups were to execute
a pincer movement in the direction of Warsaw, as a result of which the
Polish army would be surrounded and destroyed. The point of main effort
of the German attack lay with Army Group South. This army group con-
sisted of three armies, of which the 10th Army had orders to carry out the
decisive thrust to Warsaw and seize the capital. The commander of this
army was Generaloberst Walther von Reichenau and the chief of staff was
General Friedrich Paulus. One of the smaller units in this Heeresgruppe
was SS regiment ‘Adolf Hitler’. It soon became clear that it performed bad-
ly on the front. The main reason for this was the lack of military profi-
ciency. After 10 September 1939, this SS regiment was, therefore, assigned
a simpler task on the front. The face of Hitler’s elite group was thus saved
and the army group was not hindered too much by Sepp Dietrich and his
enthusiastic but incompetent SS personnel.
The task of Army Group North was first to link up Pomerania and
East Prussia by capturing the Polish corridor at Danzig. They would then
sheer off to the south in order to support von Rundstedt’s attack north-
wards. Even during the preparations for the Polish campaign, von Bock
had pointed out that it was wrong to give his army group such a subordi-
nate role. He foresaw that large sections of the Polish army would avoid
the encirclement at Warsaw by retreating towards the east over the riv-
er Vistula. So, after the capture of the Polish corridor, von Bock wanted
his army group to execute an encirclement from East Prussia to Brest-
Litovsk (some 200 kilometres east of Warsaw) in order to head off the
Polish army. However, the Oberkommando des Heeres, in other words the
Oberbefehlshaber des Heeres, General Walther von Brauchitsch, and his
chief of staff, General Franz Halder, objected to von Bock’s ideas and stuck
to the original course, obviously much to the satisfaction of von Rundstedt.
Relations between von Brauchitsch and von Bock remained good, despite
these professional differences of opinion, but in the case of von Bock and
Halder, the disagreement about the campaign in Poland was to lead to
personal irritation. This did not detract from the fact that von Bock was
by and large considered a stubborn but highly competent, intelligent and
ambitious officer. He was one of the few German commanders who had
had first-hand combat experience on the front line during the First World
War. He had been decorated for that with one of the highest honours, the
Pour le Mérite.
During the Polish campaign, his Army Group North comprised the 4th
Army and the 3rd Army. The commander-in-chief of the latter was General
der Artillerie Georg von Küchler. The air support for the army group was
provided by Air Fleet 2, which was under the command of General der
Flieger Albert Kesselring. The cooperation between von Bock, Kesselring
and von Küchler was to run smoothly throughout the operations.
Another of von Bock’s prominent subordinate commanders was Gene-
ral der Panzertruppen Heinz Guderian. He commanded the XIXth Panzer
Corps and was seeking an opportunity to test his theories on the use of
armour in practice. Once the German attack had started, it soon became
clear that von Bock had been right. Parts of the Polish army indeed tried
to escape the grip of von Rundstedt’s Army Group South by retreating
across the Vistula. The Oberkommando des Heeres, however, held fast to
the original operation plan until 9 September 1939 and only then did they
Massive show of support for the Führer in the Reichstag after the campaign against Poland,
6 October 1939.
In 1940, the German army had about twice the number of horses that they had in 1914.
This picture shows a column including a mobile kitchen near Wittenberg, on the Elbe,
on the way to the western front on 2 April 1940.
give von Bock leave to use Guderian’s Panzer Corps to strike out far to the
east. Brest-Litovsk was captured on 15 September, thus sealing the fate of
the Polish army. France and Britain were unable to help Poland and the
Soviet Union invaded the beleaguered country on 17 September 1939 in
order to occupy the territory it had been allocated in the pact of 23 August
1939. Germany and the Soviet Union subsequently signed a Grenz- und
Freundschaftsvertrag on 28 September 1939. After the fall of Warsaw the
day before, the battle continued east of the Vistula for another few days.
Poland eventually capitulated on 7 October 1939, by which time Hitler
had turned his attention to France.
German losses during the fighting in Poland amounted to 10,572 dead,
30,322 wounded and 3,404 missing. In terms of materiel, 300 tanks and
560 aircraft were lost. The battles were analysed immediately by the Ger-
man army leadership. Although the losses were not deemed to be abnor-
mally high, the battles showed that the army had numerous shortcom-
ings. The senior staffs had functioned well on the whole. The problems
lay mainly in the command at the level of the lowest commanders and
their NCOs. There were also failings in the combat training and combat
discipline of the ordinary soldiers. It was, for instance, much too often the
case that small units had been distracted from their military objectives by
undisciplined conduct towards the civilian population. Extensive training
programmes were immediately imposed on the troops in order to address
these shortcomings.
The German operation plan for the Westfeldzug
On 3 October 1939, Generaloberst Fedor von Bock, commander of Army

Group B, was ordered by the Oberkommando des Heeres to go in great
haste from Allenstein in East Prussia to Berlin to receive information about
new operations. Much to his annoyance, he had to wait until 9 October be-
fore he was able to speak to the Oberbefehlshaber des Heeres, Generaloberst
Walther von Brauchitsch. During that conversation, von Bock learned that
the Oberkommando des Heeres did not see much point in a western offen-
sive. The risks for Germany which had been identified by Halder since the
Franco-British declaration of war on 3 September still existed: a repeat of
1914-1918 was likely and Germany was nowhere near ready for a test of
strength with the French army, which was considered to be the strongest in
Europe. That same day, however, saw the issue of Adolf Hitler’s Weisung Nr.
6 für die Kriegführung, in which he ordered the Wehrmacht to prepare for
an offensive in the west. The Führer had decided “to act decisively and of-
112 chapter four
fensively without allowing much time to elapse”.22 While the staff of Army
Group B were moving from Allenstein to Bad Godesberg, von Bock went
to Frankfurt am Main to meet Generaloberst Wilhelm Ritter von Leeb, the
commander of Army Group C, which had already been posted to Ger-
many’s western border, and to take over the part of the front intended for
Army Group B. During that meeting, von Leeb pointed out that, because
of the political consequences and the Wehrmacht’s military options, he was
very much against a German offensive in the west. Von Bock was broadly
of the same opinion, although for him the military-technical considera-
tions weighed heavier than the political ones.
Army Group B, comprising the 4th Army and the 6th Army, took over
the sector of the front to the north of the Sankt Goar–Mittlach–Bisschof
line from Army Group C. On 11 October 1939, the commanders-in-chief
of the 4th Army, Generaloberst Günther von Kluge, and the 6th Army, Gene-
raloberst Walther von Reichenau, were summoned to Bad Godesberg. Von
Bock posed the question of whether a German military operation against
France, Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg was possible and, if so,
how any such offensive should be conducted. Both von Reichenau and von
Kluge rejected an attack on military-operational grounds because there
was a serious risk that it would run aground in northern France, just as it
had in 1914. Von Bock incorporated the opinions of both his subordinate
commanders in a memorandum for the Oberkommando des Heeres, which
he submitted on 12 October 1939. In it, he recommended that the initiative
should for the time being be left to France and Britain.
As a result of Hitler’s orders of 9 October to prepare for a war of ag-
gression in the west, the chief of the general staff, General Halder, drew
up an operation plan despite the objections of the commanders of the two
army groups. The planning of the Westfeldzug had thus begun. This pro-
ceeded concurrently with the preparations for the conquest of Denmark
and Norway, an operation which was referred to as Unternehmen “We-
serübung”. The task of planning this operation fell to the Seekriegsleitung.
Their domain was the naval war with Britain and the economic prepara-
tions for war, in particular ensuring the supply of iron ore from Sweden.
The Westfeldzug was part of the land war and focused primarily on defeat-
ing France. On 19 October 1939, the Oberkommando des Heeres issued
Aufmarschanweisung ‘Gelb’. Fall Gelb was the German codename for the
offensive in the west. The Oberkommando wanted to deploy 75 divisions
in order to defeat large sections of the French army and to occupy the
Netherlands, Belgium and northern France. This would, in accordance
��Hitlers Weisungen, 32-33.
22 ��
Hubatsch,
with Hitler’s wishes of 9 October, create favourable conditions for the con-
tinuation of the war against Britain. The French army would be weakened,
the Channel ports would become available and an “extended forward
area” to protect the Ruhr area would be under German control.
Halder believed that the point of main effort of the offensive should lie
to the north of Liège, so that strong German units could reach Dutch soil
by crossing the river Maas at and to the north of Maastricht and could use
parts of the Netherlands to the south of the major rivers as an advance
area. He did not expect much resistance from the Dutch army. Army
Group B, now comprising the 2nd, 4th and 6th Armies, was to be active in
the operation’s main effort. This army group, the first to come back from
Poland and thus automatically tasked for the time being with the main
part of the offensive, had to defeat the Belgian forces, eradicate any French
support and advance to the coast. Army Group A, which was positioned
between Army Group B and Army Group C, was to protect these opera-
tions by advancing south through Luxembourg and the Ardennes. On
the northern flank of Army Group B’s operations, a new Armee-Abteilung
N(ord), which would fall under the direct command of the Oberkomman-
do des Heeres, was to breach the Grebbe Line to the north of the major
Dutch rivers and take possession of Fortress Holland. And finally, Army
Group C simply had to sit out the course of the battle in its positions op-
posite the Maginot Line and then fix the French forces in this line.23
Aufmarschanweisung ‘Gelb’ was only a provisional operation plan,
not much more than the “expression of an imposed unimaginative im-
provisation”, possibly even also intended to show Hitler that he would be
well advised to avoid an offensive against France.24 There was thus wide-
spread criticism of the plan. Generaloberst Wilhelm Keitel, the chief of
the Oberkommando der Wehrmacht, objected to the operation against the
Grebbe Line and against the chosen point of main effort, just as Hitler
had done, while he was of the general opinion that the German offensive
would be too weak. On 22 October, there was a meeting about this be-
tween the Oberkommando der Wehrmacht and the Oberkommando des
Heeres, during which the possibility of abandoning the idea of an offen-
sive against Fortress Holland was discussed.
In the days that followed, there were frantic discussions between the
German army chiefs about the operational alternatives. On 25 October,
Hans-Adolf Jacobsen, ed., Dokumente zur Vorgeschichte des Westfeldzuges 1939-
23 ��
��
1940 (Göttingen, Berlin and Frankfurt, 1956) 42-51.
Hans-Adolf Jacobsen, Fall Gelb. Der Kampf um den deutschen Operationsplan zur
24 ��
��
Westoffensive 1940 (Wiesbaden, 1957) 32. K.H. Frieser, Blitzkrieg-Legende. Der Westfeldzug
1940 (Munich, 1995) 74-75.
114 chapter four
Hitler listened first to von Brauchitsch and Halder, then to von Bock, von
Reichenau and von Kluge. The Führer put forward the idea of placing the
point of main effort of the offensive to the south of Liège, then to cross the
Meuse at Namur and, once the allies had entered Flanders, advance from
there to the north-west, thereby isolating and destroying the troops that
had assembled in Belgium. This idea took the army leadership completely
by surprise. Hitler instructed the Oberkommando des Heeres “to investi-
gate the new idea”. 25
During the subsequent discussions, Hitler backtracked to his earli-
er ideas, as he so often did. Now the idea was that points of main effort
would be formed both to the north and to the south of Liège. The main
objective, after a frontal attack, was to destroy enemy troops and to reach
the Channel coast. Both points of main effort were to be reinforced with
a Panzergruppe, while the deployment of larger armoured units in the 6th
Army had to wait until safe crossing over the Meuse could be ensured.
The Oberkommando des Heeres took these ideas into account when
drawing up the second Aufmarschanweisung ‘Gelb’ of 29 October 1939.
The plan to occupy the Netherlands was abandoned completely. Army
Group B would now breach the Belgian defence lines with two points of
main effort, one on either side of Liège. If this was successful, the opera-
tion should achieve the same result that had been envisaged in the draft of
19 October. Whether that would be achieved by veering to the north-west
or the south-west after reaching the Antwerp–Brussels–Charleroi line
would depend on where the main allied force was situated at the time; in
other words, on whether the main allied force would remain in France or
move on into Belgium. Army Group A, comprising the 12th Army and the
16th Army, still had to provide protection for the flank.26
On the basis of this plan, Hitler wanted to see an attack as early as 5
November, despite resistance by the German army leadership. The date
for the attack was changed because of bad weather. This was to happen
on many more occasions in the time that followed, but not only as a re-
sult of the weather. Another reason was the inconsistency on the part of
Hitler who, by continuing to put forward new ideas, confused the military
planning process time and time again. On 11 November 1939, for exam-
ple, he ordered the staff of Guderian’s XIXth Corps to be transferred from
Army Group B to Army Group A and to take command of mechanised
25 ��
��
Hans Umbreit, “Der Kampf um die Vormachtstellung in Westeuropa” in: Klaus A.
Maier e.a., Das deutsche Reich und der zweite Weltkrieg.��
Band
��
2. Die Errichtung der Hegemo-
nie auf dem europäischen Kontinent (Stuttgart, 1979) 246-247.
“Aufmarschanweisung ‘Gelb’”, 29 oktober 1939, in: Jacobsen, Dokumente zur Vorge-
26 ��
��
schichte, 46-51. Frieser, Blitzkrieg-Legende, 75.
German paratroops training in a Junkers Ju-52, February 1940.
Heeresgruppe A May 1940

XXXXX
XXXX XXXX XXXX
4 12 16
XXX XXXX
PzGrp
15 XXII
XXX XXX XXX
41 19 14
Schnelle Truppen
and motorised divisions. This corps was to advance on the south wing via
Arlon to the Meuse at Sedan. Hitler was not sure whether the bridges over
the Meuse at Liège would indeed fall undamaged into German hands. If
they did not—a possibility which was reminiscent of the fatal delay that
the Germans had experienced at Liège in 1914—then the armoured units
of Army Group B would have to stand idly by and watch the offensive run
116 chapter four
aground. Army Group A would thus provide an alternative. For the time
being, however, Hitler’s order meant the creation of a third point of main
effort, in addition to those on either side of Liège. Hitler was of the opinion
that it would only be possible to decide on the actual point of main effort
once the operation was under way and more was known about the allied
operation. All in all, more and more emphasis was thus placed on the fron-
tal nature of the offensive and the actual objective became even less clear.
The change of date for the attack also gave the German army leadership
an opportunity to consider the operations against the Netherlands once
again. The Luftwaffe in particular objected to the plan to leave the Nether-
lands alone. After all, British air forces could, in the event of a German at-
tack, come to the Netherlands and from there bomb the Ruhr area. Hitler
was persuaded and on 15 November, the Oberkommando der Wehrmacht
issued what was known as a Holland-Weisung. Army Group B now had to
occupy the Netherlands up to the Grebbe Line and also, in conjunction
with the Kriegsmarine, prepare an attack on the West Frisian Islands, the
islands along the northern coast of the Netherlands.27 The Luftwaffe could
then set up observation posts on Dutch soil which would be able to alert
the air defences in the event of a British air attack.
Von Bock, the commander of Army Group B, was not at all happy
about this Holland-Weisung, given that the partial occupation of the
Netherlands would mean that the right flank of the 6th Army, which was
to advance through Noord-Brabant, would be left unprotected. He had
not been able to stand Halder since Poland anyway. Von Bock scoffed that
Halder was making him perform a “water pantomime”, which had noth-
ing to do with the main effort in Belgium and which did nothing to af-
fect the threat from the Netherlands itself. The army group felt, therefore,
that the whole of the Netherlands should be occupied, so that neither the
British army nor the air force would have the chance to entrench in For-
tress Holland. Once the Netherlands had been taken, troops would be-
come available for the subsequent advance on Belgium and France. The
Luftwaffe was also unhappy with the half-hearted solution offered by the
Holland-Weisung.
This bungling of the operational planning, added to the fundamental
doubt that still existed on the military side as to the capability of defeating
France, was crippling for the mutual trust between Hitler, the Oberkom-
mando der Wehrmacht and the Oberkommando des Heeres. On 23 No-
vember 1939, therefore, Hitler summoned the commanders-in-chief of
Letter from Oberbefehlshaber des Heeres Walther von Brauchitsch to Heeresgruppen-

27 ��
��
kommando B, 15 November 1939, in: Jacobsen, Dokumente zur Vorgeschichte, 55-56.
the three Services, the commanders of the army groups and armies, the
chiefs of staff of the corps and other high-ranking military personnel to
Berlin to convince them of the need for and feasibility of a war against
France and Britain. The time, Hitler told them, was ripe to attack the
allies. For the first time in German history, the risk of a dual-front war
could be avoided, thanks to the Ribbentrop-Molotov pact. The aim of a
German offensive was to eliminate France and to secure the European
mainland against any British attacks, preferably by signing a compromise
peace agreement with London, in order to have their hands free to acquire
Lebensraum in the east.
The crisis of confidence continued after this meeting, however. The in-
cident at Maasmechelen on 10 January 1940, in which important opera-
tional documents fell into Belgian hands, led to more confusion. What had
the Belgians discovered, what had they told Paris and London, how much
importance would the allies attach to the documents and, above all, what
did this mean for the German operation plans? The third Aufmarschanwei-
sung, which Hitler issued on 30 January 1940, was thus virtually the same
and equally as unsatisfying as the previous two. The idea was to advance
over a wide front to the Channel coast, conquer Belgium and defeat as
many French and British troops as possible in order to continue the war
against the allies from a stronger position. In accordance with Hitler’s or-
ders of 11 November 1939, Halder foresaw a third point of main effort, in
the Ardennes with Army Group A. As a result of the discussions about the
Holland-Weisung, the whole of the Netherlands would now be occupied.
The impasse which the operational planning had thus reached would
not be broken until the middle of February 1940. That was largely due to
the chief of staff of Army Group A, Generalleutnant Erich von Manstein.
Faced with the first Aufmarschanweisung in October 1939, he had already
reached the conclusion that the greatest objection to Halder’s operation
plans was that they would not lead to the destruction of the enemy and
could not, therefore, produce a decisive result.
The planned operation cannot have a decisive effect on the war. In terms of
numbers, the combat power ratio does not form the basis for a destructive
victory against the allied armies.28
This was because the German main effort, in Army Group B, would meet
the allied main effort head on, namely the French and British units that
Letter from the commander-in-chief of Heeresgruppe A to the Oberbefehlshaber des
28 ��
��
Heeres, 31 October 1939, in: Jacobsen, Dokumente zur Vorgeschichte, 119-122. Rundstedt ex-
pressed here what von Manstein had presented to him in a memorandum. See also: E. von
Manstein, Verlorene Siege (Bonn, 1955) 91-124, 625 ff. and Frieser, Blitzkrieg-Legende, 78-94.
118 chapter four
were on the way to the forward front in Belgium. That would probably
end in a stalemate. Von Manstein was also worried that his own Army
Group A was too weak to protect Army Group B’s long left flank against
the expected French counterattacks from the south during the advance to
the coast. Army Group B would thus not only have to expect heavy fight-
ing in front, but would also be liable to dangerous counterattacks on the
left flank.
Over the period from October 1939 to January 1940, von Manstein
was to write seven memoranda in which he gradually spelled out his
thoughts about an entirely different operation plan, first to the com-
mander of Army Group A, von Rundstedt, and through him to Halder.
Von Manstein wanted to place the German point of main effort further
south, with Army Group A. With strong mechanised and motorised units,
Army Group A would have to advance quickly through Luxembourg and
the Belgian Ardennes via Arlon to the Meuse and cross the river at Sedan.
Then, without worrying about their open flanks, the ‘mobile troops’ had
to push through northern France at the same tempo to the Channel coast
at Abbeville, the Somme estuary. They would thus slip through behind the
allied troops heading to the north and north-east. Army Group B’s task
was not to defeat the allies in their point of main effort in Flanders but
indeed to lure the enemy towards them. The further the allies advanced
into Belgium, the better: that would mean that they were leaving north-
ern France, the place where the Germans wanted to force a decision. Ulti-
mately, the entire allied force in Flanders would be surrounded and would
end up between a rock (Army Group A, in the south) and a hard place
(Army Group B, in the east and the north). The allies would have the sea
behind them. Sealed in this “Kessel”, the French, British and Belgian ar-
mies would eventually have to surrender or otherwise risk destruction.
Von Manstein thus proposed that the attack be directed not at the place
where the allies were strong but indeed at the place where they were weak.
Sedan lay to the west of the last ouvrage on the Maginot Line and the
Meuse front was relatively sparsely occupied here because the French had
positioned their best units on their left flank, along the Flanders border.
An important question was whether it would be possible for large mo-
torised and mechanised units to advance quickly, in other words in three
days, through Luxembourg and the Ardennes to the Meuse and cross
the river immediately, on the fourth day. The French had good reason to
believe that they could manage with a weak defence here. Von Manstein
was lucky in this respect in that in November 1939 the staff of Guderi-
an’s XIXth Corps had been placed under the command of Army Group A
and sent to Koblenz, which was already home to the army group’s staff.
Von Manstein and Guderian were also quartered in neighbouring hotels.
As the chief of staff of the Inspekteur der Kraftfahrtruppe, Guderian had
been the driving force behind the development of the German tank arm
and was convinced as no other of the possibilities of this new weapon.
Guderian also knew the Ardennes and the terrain at Sedan from his own
experience. He had moved through the Ardennes during the advance in
1914 and had spent a month in Sedan for a general staff course at the be-
ginning of 1918. He confirmed to von Manstein that it would be possible
for strong tank units to advance through the Ardennes to the Meuse in
three days. Conversely, von Manstein’s operation plan also confirmed Gu-
derian’s own idea that tank units should be concentrated in the point of
main effort, thereby ensuring that the whole campaign could be decided
quickly and that a futile war of attrition, such as that of 1914-1918, could
be avoided. Von Manstein’s subsequent memoranda were thus the result
of intensive and stimulating discussions with Guderian.
Von Manstein had quickly dealt with the problem of the point of main
effort, but he also had a solution for the danger of French flank attacks,
which threatened Halder’s plan. He suggested that when the main force
of tank units moved from the bridgehead at Sedan to the Somme Valley,
the units following immediately behind should break out of the bridge-
head in a southerly direction, towards Rheims, Châlons sur Marne and
from there to the southernmost point of the Maginot Line at Belfort. They
would be able to defeat the sizeable reserves that the French were keep-
ing behind the Maginot Line in Lorraine, long before they could threaten
the bridgehead. This offensive form of defence also made it unnecessary
to secure Army Group A’s four-hundred-kilometre-long left flank (from
the German-Luxembourg border to the Channel coast) with a defensive
front, because the French would simply not have the assets with which
to attack it. The tank divisions would thus be able to concentrate fully on
their race to the west.
To make all this possible, however, Army Group A would have to be
reinforced. On 30 November, prompted by von Manstein’s first memoran-
dum, von Rundstedt wrote to the Oberbefehlshaber des Heeres:
If this new operational concept, whether it serves as the basic idea for the
entire operation or merely as an addition to the attack through northern
Belgium, is to be implemented effectively, it is absolutely vital that the army
group is brought into line with it in terms of command structure and order
of battle.
120 chapter four
As many motorised and mechanised divisions as possible were to be as-

sembled at the point of main effort, according to Guderian himself “pref-
erably all of them!”.29
Up until the beginning of February 1940, the ideas of the von Man-
stein-Guderian duo had no influence on the discussions about the op-
eration plan between the Oberkommando des Heeres, the Oberkommando
der Wehrmacht and the Oberste Befehlshaber der Wehrmacht, Hitler. Hal-
der’s third Aufmarschanweisung, on 30 January, simply expanded on the
previous two. That was because Halder refused to submit von Manstein’s
memoranda to Keitel and Hitler. Halder was enough of a military profes-
sional to see the creativity, even brilliance, in von Manstein’s proposals.
But that was precisely his objection: they paved the way for something he
was dead set against, namely a premature invasion of France. Also, Hal-
der could not bear to suddenly introduce an as yet undeveloped idea into
the planning process at levels above him. Halder was a methodical man,
who would only accept an idea once all its aspects had been logically and
mathematically calculated and once all staff sections had been consulted
in detail. He did not want to run the risk that Hitler would be off and
running with von Manstein’s idea before the plan had been worked out.
It would only serve to confirm the Führer’s already preconceived notion
that the professional staff process was an obstacle in the decision-making
process and that it was better to trust purely in intuition and willpower.
If that idea went ahead, Halder, and with him the entire military leader-
ship, would no longer have a leg to stand on in his struggle with Hitler.
Nothing less than one of the main characteristics of the German military
system, namely the independence of the professional military planning,
was at stake here. On 27 January 1940, Halder even managed to have von
Manstein promoted away. On 9 February, the latter travelled, deeply dis-
appointed, to Stettin to take command of the XXXVIIIth Corps, which was
still being formed. Von Manstein was replaced by Generalleutnant Georg
von Sodenstern, a man who was known to have no expectations regarding
the use of the tank arm.
The arrival of winter, which made any offensive unfeasible for the time
being, gave Halder the opportunity in the second half of December to
study the different operational possibilities in a Kriegsspiel. The setting of
a new date for the attack, on 17 January 1940, however, made it impossible
to put this intention into practice. After the attack date had been changed
Letter from Rundstedt to the Oberbefehlshaber des Heeres Brauchitsch, 30 November

29 ��
��
1939, in: Jacobsen, Dokumente zur Vorgeschichte, 129-131. H. Guderian, Errinerungen eines
Soldaten (Neckargemünd, 1960) 79.
again, the Kriegsspiel took place after all on 7 February, two days before
von Manstein’s departure. His assumptions turned out to be correct. A
breakthrough at Sedan by three tank divisions of General Guderian’s XIXth
Corps and General Gustav von Wietersheim’s motorised XIVth Corps was
to prove highly successful. By this stage, nobody any longer expected
major allied resistance in northern France. Since the middle of January
1940, the Germans had been certain that large sections of the British and
French forces would enter Belgium. This was a result of the shock reaction
in Gamelin’s headquarters that followed the announcement of the Ger-
man operation plans after the incident at Maasmechelen on 10 January. In
response, the French had alerted all their front-line units and mobilised
their reserves. The German military intelligence service managed, after
cracking the codes, to monitor the huge volume of accompanying radio
traffic and build up an accurate picture of the French order of battle and
planned operations.
Halder gradually became convinced by the outcome of the Kriegsspiel
on 7 February and a follow-up on 14 February. So he started work on a
fourth Aufmarschanweisung, in which he incorporated the results of the
Kriegsspiele. That did not mean that he adopted von Manstein’s ideas in
full. In the advance through the Ardennes, Halder wanted infantry divi-
sions to go in front, secure the Meuse crossing and then form a strong,
unassailable bridgehead. Only once that had been achieved would the
tank divisions of Guderian’s XIXth Corps be able to perform a forward
passage of lines through the infantry and break out of the bridgehead to-
wards the coast. That would not be possible until the tenth day of battle.
This prospect filled Guderian with horror, and it would have horrified von
Manstein too, had he known, because it gave the French all the time they
needed to take countermeasures once they had realised that the German
point of main effort was not in Flanders but at Sedan. In the opinions of
von Manstein and Guderian, the tank divisions should be in the spear-
head from the start, on the fourth day, with their own infantry regiments,
fight their way across the Meuse and break out to the west immediately.
In this campaign, speed and surprise along the main axis of advance had
to be more important than combat power ratios. Halder would eventu-
ally agree to a vanguard comprising Guderian’s XIXth Corps, but would
stick to his opinion that the bridgehead they had formed should first be
extended by the infantry divisions from the next echelon before the tank
divisions were allowed to break out.
In the meantime, Hitler remained uneasy about the operation plans of
the Oberkommando des Heeres. In December 1939 and January 1940, his
122 chapter four
thoughts regularly returned to Sedan. Unlike von Manstein and Guderian,

who saw Sedan as a prerequisite for destroying the allies, Hitler regarded
Sedan as a local, tactical issue: a more suitable place to cross the river than
Maastricht, Liège or Namur. Just as in his orders of 11 November 1939,
again he dared not commit himself and announced to his generals that he
wanted to leave the point of main effort of the operation open for the time
being. He wanted the decision to depend on the actual course of the oper-
ation. It would not be their own initiative, therefore, but their response to
the actions of the allies which would determine the location of the main
effort, if it were up to the Führer.
On 2 February 1940, Hitler heard for the first time that, as well as the
three Aufmarschanweisungen from the Oberkommando des Heeres, there
were other plans in circulation. It was his aide-de-camp, Oberstleutnant
Rudolf Schmundt, who alerted him to that fact after a visit to the Army
Group A headquarters in Koblenz. Although Hitler did not realise the stra-
tegic scope of von Manstein’s operation plan, it did provide him with the
arguments he needed to impose his will on the Oberkommando des Heeres
and thus strengthen his position of power over the reluctant military lead-
ers. On 13 February, he discussed various matters with Generalmajor Alfred
Jodl, the Chef des Wehrmachtführungsamtes, and he showed himself to be
in favour of deploying the largest part of the motorised units in the direc-
tion of Sedan. On 17 February, the Führer then met with von Manstein,
who explained his ideas to him in person. Hitler was extremely impressed
by them and the next day the Oberkommando des Heeres received orders
via Jodl to make new plans which took account of the Führer’s ideas.
Halder and those around him had by then abandoned all hope of dis-
suading Hitler from an attack on France. Halder now felt that, if the cam-
paign against France was inevitable, he should opt for a flight forward and
that the best thing for him to do would be to try to achieve a crushing
defeat of the allies. Von Manstein’s operation plan offered the best chance
for this, as he himself had concluded from the Kriegsspiele. When Jodl’s
orders reached him on 18 February, his formulation of the fourth and last
Aufmarschanweisung was already well advanced.
By that time, Halder had lost another weapon with which to continue
his resistance to the campaign in France. During the winter months, Hit-
ler had ordered the attack on several occasions, but had cancelled it each
time in the period between the warning order and the implementation
order. In February 1940, this time lapse no longer existed. This was the
result of the development of what was known as the So-Fortfall, an op-
eration plan for use in the event of an allied attack on Germany. A rapid
The workhorse of the Luftwaffe, the Junkers Ju-52 transport aircraft.
Heeresgruppe B May 1940

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B 2
XXX
4
XXXX XXXX 8
XXX
18 6
XXX
2
10 XXX XXX XXX
26
4 16
XX 9
11 XX
1 27
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39 from 13 May
XX
22
124 chapter four
response by the Wehrmacht was of course of paramount importance in

such a case. In the months preceding the Westfeldzug, the operation plan
for the So-Fortfall was constantly improved and refined, whereby the time
needed between the warning order and the implementation order became
shorter and shorter. The ultimate result was that the response time for Fall
Gelb was reduced from more than six days to a few hours. The opportu-
nity for opposing an attack order had thus disappeared.
On 24 February 1940, Halder had finished the Neufassung der
Aufmarschanweisung ‘Gelb’. Its key sentence read as follows:
The troops deployed to the south of the Liège–Charleroi line will force the
crossing over the Meuse between Dinant and Sedan (including both places)
and open the way to the northern French border defence towards the lower
reaches of the Somme.
In all its simplicity, this sentence placed the attack’s point of main effort
clearly with Army Group A: the 4th Army was incorporated in this army
group and half of the German armoured units, later organised in Pan-
zergruppe Kleist, were assigned to the 12th Army, which was to bring about
the breach at Sedan. The 16th Army was to protect the southern flank of
the operation.30 Halder thus abandoned the second attack proposed by von
Manstein, from the bridgehead to the south, against the French reserves
in Lorraine. The new operation plan was later dubbed the Sichelschnitt-
plan, an analogy which likened the advance to Abbeville to the motion of a
reaper who puts his sickle to a sheaf of corn and then chops it down.
The impasse in the operational decision-making had finally been bro-
ken. The plan of 24 February 1940 combined the genius of von Manstein,
the methodical testing of his operational concept by Halder, its execution
by Guderian, the will and the authority of Hitler and, finally, the certainty
regarding the Franco-British operations in Belgium. That did not mean,
however, that everyone was now in agreement on the German side. Af-
ter the months of unresolved discussions about the operation plan, the
breakthrough in the fourth Aufmarschanweisung came as a shock to
many. Among the army commanders within Army Group A, and also
more broadly within the ranks of the German generals, there was consid-
erable doubt as to the chances of Halder’s operation plan leading to vic-
tory. They had not been convinced by the Kriegsspiele of 7 and 14 Febru-
ary 1940. The most outspoken of the critics were the chief of staff of Army
Group A, Generalleutnant von Sodenstern, and the commander of Army
“Neufassung der Aufmarschanweisung ‘Gelb’”, 24 February 1940, in: Jacobsen, Do-

30 ��
��
kumente zur Vorgeschichte, 64-68.
Group B, Generaloberst von Bock. Their arguments were highly reminis-

cent of the French theories about the obstacle value of the Ardennes and
the Meuse. The dense concentration of tank units in Army Group A, the
advance though the Ardennes, the Meuse crossing and the open flanks
during the advance to the coast were all far too great a risk and actually
heralded the failure of the plan. Why should the passage through the ar-
duous terrain of the Ardennes succeed where the crossing of the flat ter-
rain of Flanders had ended in a fiasco in 1914? In both cases, the objective
was, after all, to envelop and take out the enemy’s main force. Did Halder
actually realise how vulnerable the tank columns were to air strikes on
the narrow roads in the Ardennes, certainly if the offensive ran aground
on the French Meuse defences? Did Halder really think that the French
units in the Maginot Line to the east of Sedan would let Guderian proceed
unchallenged? But even if the river crossing at Sedan and the breakout
from the bridgehead succeeded, what was the point if Guderian’s corps
was then destroyed by the French operational reserves on the southern
flank? In these circles, Halder was referred to as the “gravedigger of the
tank arm” and his plan was described as “foolish and reckless”.31 This dis-
sension about the chances of success in the point of main effort of Fall
Gelb was never to disappear and would even play a role in the execution
of the operation.
The decision had been made, however, and Halder, ironically the man
who had at first opposed von Manstein’s plan the most vehemently, stuck
to his decision. The task of Army Group C remained unchanged—to fix
the French in the Maginot Line. The task of Army Group B was to capture
the Netherlands and thus prevent the country being used as an operating
base for the allies. It was also supposed to draw the allied forces present
in Belgium and fix them. The operation plan now contained a number of
elements which were ideal for directing the attention of the allied high
command to the northern part of the theatre of operations and to confirm
their expectations that the German main effort lay in Flanders. These ele-
ments related to the deployment of air forces. During the first three days
of the offensive, the bombers and Stukas (Sturzkampfflugzeuge) would
mainly appear near Army Group B, above Belgium and the Netherlands.
Over the Ardennes, the Luftwaffe would concentrate on fighter plane ac-
tions to engage French and British reconnaissance units. Only when Gu-
derian had to cross the Meuse and form a bridgehead on the left bank of
the river would the tactical air support capacity, namely the Stukas, be as-
��Blitzkrieg-Legende, 78-94, 102-103, 110-114.

31 ��
Frieser,
126 chapter four
signed urgently to the point of main effort. There, the bombers would per-
form interdiction tasks and the fighter planes would gain air supremacy.
But more importantly, from the first minutes of battle, Gamelin’s at-
tention would be drawn to the north by the spectacular deployment of
a new weapon, the airborne troops. On the morning of the first day of
battle, the showpiece of the Belgian fortifications, Fort Eben Emael, which
defended the bridges over the Albert Canal to the north of Liège, would
have to be taken out by a special air-landing unit, which was to use gliders
to land on top of the fort. At the same time, paratroops in the Netherlands
would take the bridges at Moerdijk, Dordrecht and Rotterdam by surprise
and airborne troops would capture three airfields near The Hague. For all
these units themselves, the tactical assignments were of course the most
important, but the real importance of their actions lay at a higher opera-
tional level: to deceive the allied high command with regard to the point
of main effort of the offensive.32
Given that the capture of the Netherlands had become a significant
part of Army Group B’s operations, a decision had already been made
earlier, in January 1940, to form a new army. It became the 18th Army,
the staff of which was already in the army group under the command of
General der Artillerie Georg von Küchler. This was the staff which had led
the 3rd Army during the Polish campaign. The 18th Army was allocated the
front section to the north of the 6th Army, which was under the command
of Generaloberst Walther von Reichenau and was also the location of the
point of main effort of Army Group B’s attack. It was supported in its op-
erations by Air Fleet 2 under the command of General der Flieger Albert
Kesselring. The decision-making regarding the operations against the
Netherlands and the implementation thereof thus fell to the three com-
manders, von Bock, von Küchler and Kesselring, who had already shown
that they could work well together in the Polish campaign. For the de-
velopment of the plan of attack on the Netherlands, they were able to fall
back on earlier ideas on the subject. Similar plans of attack had already
been made in 1939 as a result of the Holland-Weisung.
Plan of attack of the 18th Army
On 19 November 1939, the Xth Corps, which was part of Army Group B,
revealed its own plan of attack. In this plan, one of the infantry divisions
of the corps, the 227th, had the task of crossing the IJssel at Deventer and
32 �Ibidem, XXI, 103-105, 301.

When the German army invaded the Netherlands, it used a number of armoured trains
in order to be able to push through quickly into the depth.
Delivering indirect fire with German 88mm guns at Maastricht, 10 May 1940.
128 chapter four
Zutphen and then pushing through to Amersfoort by way of Apeldoorn.

The 207th Infantry Division was to march on Utrecht via Arnhem and Ede.
Both divisions would be provided with a motorised vanguard with extra
artillery and engineer support. The unit reporting for this task that same
day was SS regiment ‘Der Führer’, which had, however, guarded part of
Germany’s western border during the attack on Poland and had therefore
had no combat experience. The 227th Infantry Division did not receive its
motorised vanguard until later, in the form of SS regiment ‘Adolf Hitler’.
Unlike SS regiment ‘Der Führer’, this regiment had indeed gained experi-
ence in Poland, but had, according to many Wehrmacht officers, failed.
At 12.00 hrs on 29 January 1940, the staff of the 18th Army took over
the command in its front sector and the plans of attack could be devel-
oped further. The 18th Army was to attack the Netherlands with the 1st
Cavalry Division, the Xth Corps and the XXVIth Corps. The general as-
signment was to occupy the Netherlands as quickly as possible and thus
release units for the fighting against the French and British armies else-
where in the army group’s sector. In support of this task, the airborne
corps, under the command of Generalleutnant Kurt Student, would con-
duct an airborne operation within Fortress Holland.
In the 18th Army’s plan of attack, the 1st Cavalry Division played a sub-
ordinate role. The division’s task was to occupy the northern provinces
and then cross the IJsselmeer to breach Fortress Holland near Enkhui-
zen. The Xth Corps, on the other hand, attracted considerably more of von
Küchler’s attention. This corps, reinforced by the two SS regiments, was to
breach the IJssel Line north of the major rivers and attack the New Dutch
Waterline. No account was taken of strong defences on the Grebbe Line.
The point of main effort of the 18th Army’s attack lay, however, with the
XXVIth Corps. This corps had the task of breaching the Peel-Raam Posi-
tion and establishing communications with the German paratroops who
had landed by the Moerdijk bridges. A front also had to be formed to the
south in order to ward off an allied counterattack from the direction of
Antwerp and Zeeland. On 10 May 1940, the corps had the 254th Infantry
Division, the 256th Infantry Division, the SS Verfügungsdivision and the 9th
Panzer Division to perform these tasks. Both the infantry divisions had
the task of breaking through the Peel-Raam Position in order to clear the
way to the west for the other two divisions.
In order to check the feasibility of this corps’ plan of attack, Armee-
oberkommando 18 held a Kriegsspiel on 28 February 1940 based on the
existing plans and order of battle. Another aim of this Kriegsspiel was to
train the commanders and staff of the corps and the divisions in making
decisions and issuing orders to their units. The Kriegsspiel was based on
the assumption that, with the exception of the railway bridge at Gen-
nep, all the bridges over the Maas had been destroyed, including those
at Mook and Grave. Other assumptions were that Dutch troops would
quickly have vacated the Peel-Raam Position and that the Luftwaffe would
have eliminated the Dutch air force in a surprise attack and gained control
of the airspace. A major problem was the limited road network in Noord-
Brabant, which meant that there was a considerable risk of traffic jams
during the German advance. It was also assumed that British, French and
Belgian troops in Noord-Brabant, at ’s-Hertogenbosch for example, would
attempt to halt the German advance.
During the two-day Kriegsspiel, the participants discussed and ana-
lysed all the possibilities of the attack by the XXVIth Corps. In the con-
cluding meeting, von Küchler once again pointed out what the aim of this
exercise had been:
It was partly to focus your thinking and point out that, in the event of an
attack, it is important to deny the enemy the initiative by acting as quickly
as possible, that this command post exercise was held. More specifically, the
aim of the exercise was to reflect on and calculate, on the basis of the situ-
ation likely to arise in the course of the battle, how the battle of the XXVIth
Corps in the army’s point of main effort would proceed in terms of time.33
Von Bock, who had himself been present at the Kriegsspiel on 28 February,
felt that things had been extremely favourably presented:
The commander-in-chief of the 18th Army is acting very favourably for the
German side. He has brought down the Maas and Peel positions in two days,
wiped out the first wave of British motorised divisions when they were still
on the other side of Antwerp and only let two Belgian infantry divisions get
as far as Breda. The assessment of the situation regarding the bridges over
the Maas is also extremely favourable. Nonetheless, day 3 of the attack is
the major battle, but after linkup has been successfully established with the
paratroops at the Moerdijk bridge.34
Von Bock’s conclusion was that the 18th Army should be reinforced with
two divisions on the third day of the attack, when the advance had reached
the area around Breda in Noord-Brabant. This request was submitted to
Halder by telephone that same day. Halder rejected it, however, where-
upon von Bock, in consultation with Armeeoberkommando 18, came up
with another solution. If it became clear that the advance of the Xth Corps
33 ��
Armeeoberkommando
��
18 Nr.��
310/40
��
g.Kdos, in: Bundesarchiv-Militärarchiv (BA-
MA), Freiburg im Breisgau, 8117/5.
34 ��
Kriegstagebuch
��
Nr.��
2 der Heeresgruppe B, in: BA-MA, RH 19 II/19.
��
130 chapter four
was going to stagnate, the two SS regiments would be removed and placed
under the command of the XXVIth Corps. Von Bock now faced the attack
on the Netherlands with confidence. In a situation assessment of Army
Group B on 8 March 1940, he again assumed that the fate of the Nether-
lands could be decided on the third day of fighting. By then, the XXVIth
Corps would have reached the Moerdijk bridges, thus denying French and
British troops any chance of entering Fortress Holland from Flanders or
Zeeland. It was impossible to say beforehand how long the Dutch army
would be able to hold Fortress Holland, but victory would in any event
be the 18th Army’s. Von Bock was still more concerned about the complex
situation in Breda after the third day of fighting, given that there would
be three different directions of attack from here: against Fortress Holland,
against Zeeland and against Antwerp. He still believed, therefore, that the
troops in Noord-Brabant would have to be reinforced on the third day
and that when the 6th Army and the 18th Army linked up, a new corps
would have to be established in order to ensure effective command.35
There was a special role for the airborne troops. On 4 November 1939,
the Oberkommando des Heeres had already told Army Group B about the
possibility of conducting airborne operations with the aim of taking out
the Belgian Fort Eben Emael and capturing the nearby bridges over the
Albert Canal. They also wondered whether airborne operations would
also be useful at Namur and Ghent. Von Bock was not very keen on this
idea, however. Any airborne operations, which were the province of the
Luftwaffe, had to be fitted in with the planned operations of the army
group. It was the wrong way round to change or even adapt these op-
erations according to the availability of the airborne units. Furthermore,
there had been little experience of using these troops, so their deployment
was risky. However, von Bock had no say in the airborne operations at
Fort Eben Emael and at the bridges over the Albert Canal. These opera-
tions remained under the direct supervision of Hitler himself.
After Army Group B had studied the various possibilities for an air-
borne operation, only the Netherlands remained. On 22 January 1940, the
Oberkommando des Heeres gave orders for the preparation of airborne op-
erations at the Moerdijk bridges and at Rotterdam. The motive for this
was that it would thus be impossible for the British, who would undoubt-
edly rush to the Netherlands’ aid, to get into Fortress Holland and en-
trench behind the New Dutch Waterline. This operation was assigned to
the 7th Air Division and the 22nd Air Transportable Division. There were as
“Beurteilung der Lage der HGr.B nach dem Stande vom 8.3.1940” in: Jacobsen, Do-
35 ��
��
kumente zur Vorgeschichte, 113-118.
yet few specific details about the operation, given that Göring was keeping
the preparation to himself for the time being.
It was not until 6 February that things became clearer for Army Group
B, when Kesselring and several staff officers went to see von Bock again
in his headquarters in Bad Godesberg. The 7th Air Division was to be de-
ployed at the Moerdijk bridges, Dordrecht and Rotterdam, while the 22nd
Air Transportable Division had the task of landing around The Hague in
order to capture the Queen, the government and the army chiefs. This last
plan was related to an idea that had surfaced recently, namely to send an
envoy, Werner Kiewitz, to the Dutch government at the start of the hos-
tilities to offer a halt to the German attack if the Netherlands accepted
German military protection immediately. The air-transportable division
had been an ordinary infantry division, which had taken part in the at-
tack on Poland. On 10 November 1939, the division had been given the
status of air-transportable division, which meant that it would be flown in
transport aircraft to the deployment area. The air-transportable division
therefore trained in the rapid embarkation and debarkation of transport
aircraft. There was thus no question of it being a special elite unit. The
7th Air Division, which was established in 1938, was, on the other hand,
a paratrooper unit and belonged to the Luftwaffe. A German paratrooper
had to meet stringent requirements, so this could indeed be described as
an elite unit.
It was, however, the first that Army Group B had heard of the proposed
airborne operation at The Hague. Von Bock was not really interested in
the operation at The Hague, because it was not in keeping with his op-
eration plans. If the airborne corps succeeded in its task of capturing the
Dutch government, that would, in von Bock’s view, be a bonus. For him, it
was more important to capture the Moerdijk bridges undamaged, as this
would open the way to Fortress Holland. The airborne operation would
commence at the time the German troops crossed the Dutch border.
To support the airborne operations and the capture of the Netherlands,
Army Group B was allocated General der Luftwaffe Richard Putzier with
three squadrons. After some discussion, von Bock and Kesselring agreed
that Army Group B’s forward units should be at the Moerdijk bridges on
the third day of the attack. For his part, Kesselring promised that Air Fleet
2 would do all it could to prevent the British and the French advancing
northwards from Antwerp.
The entire plan for the airborne operation, conceived by Student and
finalised on 23 February 1940, was not discussed until 14 March during a
meeting between von Bock, Kesselring, Student, H.E.O. Graf von Sponeck
132 chapter four
A Kampffliegertruppe’s radio post, Netherlands, 12 May 1940.
and Putzier. As well as being the commander of the 7th Air Division, Stu-
dent had also been appointed commander of the airborne corps, into
which his division had been merged with von Sponeck’s 22nd Air Trans-
portable Division. Because the two divisions would be landing some dis-
tance from each other and had different missions, and because Student
did not have a corps staff, the 22nd Air Transportable Division would be
left entirely to its own devices throughout the operation.
On 16 March 1940, von Bock, von Reichenau and von Küchler went
to see Hitler in Berlin to report on progress by Army Group B. At this
meeting, von Küchler told the Führer in detail about the 18th Army’s plan
of attack. In his closing words at this meeting, Hitler assessed the combat
power of the Dutch army as follows: “The defence capabilities of the Neth-
erlands should be regarded as extremely limited.”36 The last Kriegsspiel
that the staff of the German 18th Army held prior to the campaign against
the Netherlands, on 25 and 26 April 1940, pointed in the same direction.
Even if six to eight British or French divisions came to the assistance of
the Netherlands, the 18th Army would have penetrated Fortress Holland
and defeated the Netherlands by the morning of the fifth day of war.37
36 ��
Kriegstagebuch
��
Nr.��
2��
des Heeresgruppe B, in: BA-MA, RH 19 II/19.
an Gent, Het falen van de Nederlandse gewapende neutraliteit, september 1939-
37 ��
T. v��
mei 1940 (Amsterdam, 2009) 106-107.
In March and April, the German army leadership focused much atten-
tion on troop discipline. This was because they were far from happy about
the conduct of German soldiers during the Polish campaign. Military dis-
cipline had, in their view, left much to be desired. Plundering and the kill-
ing of defenceless civilians had not been unusual. The objections of the
German army leadership were not only of an ethical nature; any uncon-
trolled actions of troops not only damaged the image of the army, but also
led, and that was perhaps the most important consideration, to a reduc-
tion of combat power. When the German troops took up their positions
in the Westwall, discipline was stepped up. Measures were taken to stop
the excessive consumption of alcohol, the courts martial dealt out stiffer
punishments for absence without leave and, above all, the officers were
made aware of their role in maintaining military discipline and order. The
Oberbefehlshaber des Heeres wrote to his subordinates, for example: “Once
again I must warn emphatically against drunkenness and alcohol abuse.
Violations will weigh twice as heavily in these times.”38 Particular atten-
tion was paid to the treatment of prisoners of war. The soldiers were also
given instructions on how they should conduct themselves towards civil-
ians in occupied territory, a few of them being:
1. Decent military conduct is the primary duty. Any damage to the image of
the German Wehrmacht will be severely punished. 2. The occupied country
and its population may not be exploited. They are under the special pro-
tection of each individual German soldier. 3. Looting and acts of violence
towards peaceful civilians will be punished with the most severe penalties
under military criminal law. The sentence may be the death penalty.39
The Netherlands’ neutrality was another problem. The Oberkommando

der Wehrmacht realised that, before the attack on the neutral countries of
Belgium and the Netherlands, it would be advisable to convince the Ger-
man troops of the legitimacy of such an attack by claiming that the allies
had violated the territory of these countries first. In the Wehrmachtsbericht
of 10 May 1940, the Oberkommando der Wehrmacht therefore declared:
In view of the imminent extension of enemy operations to Belgian and
Dutch territory and the accompanying threat to the Ruhr area, the German
38 ��
Armeeoberkommando
��
18, Ia, nr.��
1330/40,
��
“Geselligkeit im Kriege”, 27 February
1940, in: BA-MA, W 3879.
39 ��
Befehl
��
für das Verhalten des deutschen Soldaten im besetzten Gebiet, 22. Februar
1940 in: BA-MA, RH 19 II/164. In more depth: H. Amersfoort, ‘Ik had mijn roode-kruis
band afgedaan’. Oorlogsrecht en gedragingen van Nederlandse en Duitse militairen in gevecht,
mei 1940 (The Hague, 2005) 81-92.
134 chapter four
Westheer will be ready at daybreak on 10 May to cross Germany’s western

border in an attack across the widest possible front.40
The alert
For the German troops in the Westwall, 9 May 1940 started like any other
day. It was warm and sunny. Generaloberst von Bock performed an in-
spection of an artillery battery. At 11.25 hrs, Army Group B received a
telex message from Berlin. The telex had come from the Oberkommando
des Heeres and read as follows: “To Army Group B. ‘Yellow 10 May 1940,
05.35 hrs.’”41
This message was transmitted by telephone to Armeeoberkommando 6
at 11.30 hrs. Armeeoberkommando 18 was alerted in the same way two
minutes later and they both passed the alert on to their own units. Heeres-
gruppenkommando B had stressed that the enemy was to know nothing
of the imminent attack. This meant that only the key officials would be
informed initially and that the troop movements to the assault line would
not take place until after dark. Von Bock left his headquarters in the after-
noon to check personally on the 4th Panzer Division’s preparations for the
attack; this was the unit that was to be deployed at his army group’s point
of main effort at Maastricht. At 20.10 hrs, the army group received a tele-
phone message from the Oberkommando des Heeres with the codeword
“Danzig”. That meant that the attack was now irreversible. The Heeres-
gruppenkommando passed the message to its own units in the same way as
the first alert. Hitler travelled that night by train from Berlin to a bunker
complex at Euskirchen in the northern Eifel. He and the Oberkomman-
do der Wehrmacht and the Oberkommando des Heeres were to stay there
throughout the Westfeldzug.
On 10 May 1940, all units received special orders from Hitler. The
Führer ended these orders with the following call:
What we have seen as a growing threat for many months has now happened.
Under cover of a gigantic diversionary manoeuvre in south-eastern Europe,
England and France are trying to get into the Ruhr area through Holland
and Belgium.
Soldiers of the Western Front!
“OKW-Bericht vom 10.5.40.” in: Hans-Adolf Jacobsen, ed., Dokumente zum West-
40 ��
��
feldzug 1940 (Göttingen, Berlin and Frankfurt, 1960) 4.
41 ��
��
In May 1940, there was a time difference of 1 hour and 40 minutes between the
Netherlands and Germany.��
For
��
the sake of clarity, all references in the text, with the excep-
tion of the German quotations, are based on Dutch time.
That means your time has come!

The battle starting today will decide the fate of the German nation for the
next thousand years.
Do your duty!
The German people are with you with their wishes for victory.42
Several hours before the attack was to start, the units tasked with captur-
ing the various bridges in the Dutch border area undamaged started on
their way. The unrest on the German border had not gone unnoticed by
the Dutch, who started setting up obstacles. The atmosphere on both sides
of the border was highly charged as troops awaited the break of day.
“Tagesbefehl Hitlers vom 10.50.40” in: Ibidem, 3-4.

42 ��
��
136 chapter four
Broad outline of the organisation of Army Group B

and Air Fleet 2 on 10 May 1940
On 10 May 1940, Army Group B was made up of the 6th Army and the
18th Army, both of which consisted of a number of corps. The 18th Army
comprised the Xth Corps and the XXVIth Corps, while the 6th Army con-
sisted of four corps, namely the IVth, the IXth, the XIth and the XXVIIth.
The staff of the XVIth Panzer Corps also belonged to the 6th Army. On
10 May 1940, only the 3rd Panzer Division, which had not been placed
in the first line, was still under the command of this staff. The idea was,
after forcing the crossing of the Albert Canal, to reassign the 4th Panzer
Division from the IVth Corps to the XVIth Panzer Corps as well and to
make this corps the spearhead of the 6th Army. The corps were made up
of two or three infantry divisions, if necessary reinforced with a Panzer
division. Army Group B numbered 26 infantry divisions in total. It also
had three Panzer divisions, the two mentioned above in the 6th Army as
well as the 9th Panzer Division in the 18th Army. If we discount southern
Limburg, which was merely a transit area for the Germans, there were
six infantry divisions, one Panzer division, the SS Verfügungsdivision
and a cavalry division involved in the attack on the Netherlands as far as
the army was concerned. For the land war, one should also add the Luft-
waffe’s 7th Air Division and 22nd Air Transportable Division.
The German army thus had one more command level (Land Forces,
Army Group, Army, Corps, Division) than the Dutch army (Army, Field
Army, Corps, Division), but in the German system not all levels had the
same tasks. The staffs of the army groups and of the corps were only re-
sponsible for the operational command. The staffs of the armies and the
divisions, on the other hand, were also responsible for the personnel and
equipment in the units under their command. Army and division thus
enjoyed a high degree of autonomy and had relatively large staffs. The
organically assigned staff of an army numbered 498 officers, NCOs and
other ranks, as well as 1,864 men to look after communications and 280
men for all sorts of other tasks.
The basic unit of the German organisation was the infantry division.
This usually numbered over 17,000 men. The staff of a division, including
the signals personnel, consisted of 38 officers, 6 civil servants, 125 NCOs
and 315 other ranks. The infantry divisions usually comprised three in-
fantry regiments, an artillery regiment, a reconnaissance battalion, an
antitank battalion and a number of smaller medical, support and engi-
neer units.
An armoured division was made up of more than 13,000 men. The

18th Army had, as mentioned above, just one armoured division under its
command, namely the 9th Panzer Division. This Austrian unit had been
formed on 3 January 1940 from the 4th Light Division and consisted of
two infantry regiments and one armoured regiment. The organic strength
of tanks and armoured vehicles was made up of: 37 Panzerkampfwagen I,
59 Panzerkampfwagen II, 40 Panzerkampfwagen III and 24 Panzerkampf-
wagen IV. The weaponry of Panzerkampfwagen I consisted of two ma-
chine guns. Types II, III and IV had, besides a machine gun, a gun with
a calibre of 2 cm, 3.7 cm and 7.5 cm, respectively. Compared to the other
operational areas of Army Groups A and B, the deployment of German
tanks for the attack on Fortress Holland was modest. Moreover, the 9th
Panzer Division was, in view of its equipment, one of the weakest of the
ten Panzer divisions that the German army had in 1940.
The tactical air support for Army Group B was provided by Air Fleet
2, whose commander, General der Flieger Albert Kesselring, was on an
adjacent command level with the commander of Army Group B, General-
oberst Fedor von Bock. Air Fleet 2 consisted of: the IVth Air Corps, the
VIIIth Air Corps, the 11th Flak Corps, the 7th Air Division, the 22nd Air
Transportable Division and Long-range Reconnaissance Group 122. The
air fleet was the largest operational unit in the Luftwaffe. The number and
type of the units assigned were not set organically. For each operation, the
Oberbefehlshaber der Luftwaffe made a number of flight units available to
the Oberbefehlshaber of the air fleet and these remained under his com-
mand until his assigned mission had been accomplished. The air corps
was itself made up of wings. The wing was the largest mobile and ho-
mogenous formation in the Luftwaffe and normally consisted of a staff
squadron of six aircraft and three groups. The group was the smallest
operational and administrative flight unit and consisted of a staff flight
made up of three aircraft and three squadrons. Each squadron had three
flights, consisting of three aircraft each, as well as three planes in reserve.
In principle, the air fleet had the same command and organisational
structure as the army group. That allowed a flexible response to changing
situations and ensured good cooperation between army and air force.
CHAPTER FIVE
THE GENERALS’ DUEL: FIVE DAYS OF WAR

AT THE MILITARY STRATEGIC LEVEL
Düsseldorf, Friday 10 May 1940
The night before 10 May 1940 was a quiet one for the staff of Army Group
B. The orders had been given and the troops were taking their positions
according to plan. For the time being, there was nothing left for General-
oberst Fedor von Bock and his staff officers to do except wait for the break
of day. That night, the operations division of Armeeoberkommando 18
moved from Wuppertal to Wesel, where a command post was set up. Von
Bock received word from the divisions on the front line that explosions
had been heard in Dutch territory. That led the army group to conclude
that, despite the strict secrecy measures, the Dutch were expecting the
German attack. At 03.55 hrs that night, the commander of the 18th Army,
General der Artillerie Georg von Küchler, was present at the 256th Infantry
Division to witness the start of the offensive in person. Von Küchler re-
turned to his own command post at 05.00 hrs.
At 04.00 hrs, the Luftwaffe reported to Army Group B that all aircraft
that were to be involved in the attack on the Netherlands had started and
that the airborne divisions of Generalleutnant K. Student and Generalleut-
nant H.E.O. Graf von Sponeck had entered Dutch airspace without hav-
ing come under fire. The mist had lifted and the weather was excellent.
The good news that the railway bridge at Gennep had fallen into German
hands undamaged reached Army Group B as early as 04.50 hrs. A set-
back, however, was the report that all the other bridges across the Maas
which the 18th Army had intended to use had been destroyed in time by
the Dutch. This was not considered to have catastrophic consequences for
the execution of the attack, because Army Group B had taken this even-
tuality into account and provided extra bridge-laying equipment. Five of
the bridges over the Juliana Canal in the path of the 6th Army’s advance
had been taken without damage. By around 06.20 hrs, Army Group B had
been informed that the air-landing operation at the Belgian Fort Eben
140 chapter five
General Headquarters
regularly issued “army
announcements” to
keep the population
informed about the
progress of the fighting.
Emael near Liège was proceeding according to plan and that the Belgians
had only destroyed the bridge over the Albert Canal at Kanne in that sec-
tor. At the same time, it was reported that troops had broken into the
Peel-Raam Position near Mill.
Von Bock then went to the IVth Corps, where the focus of Army Group
B’s operations lay, to see for himself the progress being made at Maas-
tricht. He informed his staff of his findings by telephone at 10.10 hrs. The
4th Panzer Division, which was part of the IVth Corps, was at the time in
the process of crossing the Maas at Maastricht and von Bock pointed out
that it was imperative that the operation be completed in the night of 10
May. Von Küchler’s 18th Army had been informed by 10.20 hrs that the
para operations at the Moerdijk bridges and at Rotterdam had been suc-
cessful. Although the 18th Army did not have any detailed information, it
was assumed that Von Sponeck’s operation near The Hague, conversely,
had not succeeded.
the generals’ duel 141
At 11.20 hrs, Army Group B had sufficient insight into the overall situ-
ation in its front sector in order to inform the Oberkommando des Heeres,
where General der Artillerie Franz Halder was in charge as Chief of Staff.
According to von Bock’s report, the developments at Maastricht and Gen-
nep looked promising for the 6th Army and the 18th Army, respectively,
whilst no British landings had been observed in the Netherlands yet. In
addition, aerial reconnaissance had shown that the British and French ar-
mies had still not crossed the Belgian border. For the time being, Army
Group B need not expect any threat from that direction. Nonetheless,
von Bock urged his subordinate commanders, Generaloberst Walther von
Reichenau of the 6th Army and General Georg von Küchler of the 18th
Army, to make haste. This was not really necessary, or as von Bock put it
in his journal: “This light pressure will not be necessary for either of them,
because they know what really matters—I must not, however, neglect any
opportunity to push things forward.”1 From the reports that came in later
that afternoon, Army Group B concluded that the Dutch Light Division
was being pulled back from the Peel-Raam Position in order to be rede-
ployed at Fortress Holland. Although the Peel-Raam position had not yet
been breached, Armeeoberkommando 18 expected that the Dutch would
soon evacuate that line in view of the situation at Mill.
At the end of the first day of war, von Bock was confident about the
campaign to come. In his opinion, the resistance put up by the Dutch and
Belgian armies had not been very strong. For both the 6th Army and the
18th Army, the situation on the whole had developed according to plan.
The orders for 11 May therefore did not divert from the operation plan.
The 6th Army was crossing the Maas and now had to hold the bridgehead
at Maastricht and cross the Albert Canal at Eben Emael. As far as the
Netherlands was concerned, the possibility had been taken into account
that the country might capitulate on the first day. In that case, the crossing
of the border according to the operation orders issued would have taken
the form of a “peaceful occupation”. Von Bock had not taken that possi-
bility very seriously nor, for that matter, the related airborne operation—a
Luftwaffe operation. Von Bock was therefore not particularly worried by
the fact that this operation had turned out to be a fiasco. In this theatre of
operations, his main objective on the first day was the Moerdijk bridges
and, fortunately, the paratroops’ attack there had been successful.
The operations of the 1st Cavalry Division and the Xth Corps also pro-
ceeded according to plan. That corps was already becoming the focus of
1 Kriegstagebuch Fedor von Bock, 10 May 1940, in: Bundesarchiv-Militärarchiv,

Freiburg im Breisgau (BA-MA), N 22/5.
142 chapter five
operations. Upon reaching the IJssel, the 227th Infantry Division had found
that all the bridges over that river had been blown up. It took them until
the afternoon to cross the river, and then, due to a lack of bridge-laying
equipment, the forward troops were halted in front of the Apeldoorn
Canal. The 207th Infantry Division, however, advancing further to the
south, had practically reached the Grebbe Line by the end of the day. This
was therefore presumably where the main attack would take place. With a
view to that attack, this division was reinforced in the evening of 10 May
by a battalion of the SS regiment ‘Adolf Hitler’. Given that everything else
was going practically according to expectations, the 18th Army saw no rea-
son to deviate from the planned operations. Von Küchler pointed out to
the commander of the XXVIth Corps, General der Artillerie Albert Wodrig,
that he should advance to Breda as quickly as possible, according to plan.
The 9th Panzer Division, which was to establish communications with the
German paratroops who had landed at the Moerdijk bridges, was therefore
ordered to prepare to cross the Maas as soon as the Peel-Raam Position
had actually been breached. The only change to the plans for the advance
concerned the bridges over the Maas which the 9th Panzer Division was to
use. As the bridges at Grave and Ravenstein had been blown up, the di-
vision would cross at Gennep and Mook, as soon as the pontoon bridges
there were ready. The SS Verfügungsdivision was also ordered to prepare to
cross the Maas at Gennep.
The Hague, Friday 10 May 1940
After a steady stream of communications in the evening of Thursday 9

May, after midnight a certain calm had descended over General Head-
quarters.2 From 01.30 hrs, however, the headquarters was phoned several
times by Lieutenant General P.W. Best’s Air Defence Command, reporting
large foreign aircraft formations over the Netherlands. Two hours later it
became clear that German raiding parties were attacking the Maas bridges
and other locations in the border regions. From 04.00 hrs, by which time
day was beginning to dawn, there were reports of bombing raids on vari-
ous airfields. These raids destroyed many aircraft on the ground. After
05.00 hrs, reports followed of German paratroops landing at and around
the airfields of Waalhaven (near Rotterdam) and Ypenburg, Ockenburg
and Valkenburg (near The Hague). Paratroops also landed near Dordrecht
2 The outline of the Dutch command at General Headquarters level is mainly derived
from V.E Nierstrasz, Inleiding en Algemeen Overzicht van de gevechtsdagen 10-19 mei 1940
(The Hague, 1957).
Meeting at General Headquarters at Lange Voorhout 7 in The Hague: the navy Chief of Staff,
Vice Admiral J.Th. Furstner (centre), the army Chief of Staff, Major General H.F.M. baron
van Voorst tot Voorst (left) and the Commander-in-Chief, General H.G. Winkelman.
and south of the Moerdijk bridges. Near the Maas bridges in Rotterdam,
the Germans landed using floatplanes. The Belgians were reporting simi-
lar events. There, the target was the bridges over the Albert Canal.
In the meantime, at around 03.30 hrs, General Winkelman and his
chief adviser, army Chief of Staff Major General H.F.M. baron van Voorst
tot Voorst, had arrived at General Headquarters. They established that the
Netherlands was effectively at war with the German Reich. The main thing
now for Winkelman was to form a general picture of the situation. Then the
commander-in-chief would have to establish what countermeasures were
required. Winkelman could leave the execution of his orders to his main
subordinate commanders, the Commander of the Field Army, Lieutenant
General J.J.G. baron van Voorst tot Voorst, in Zeist, and the Commander of
Fortress Holland, Lieutenant General J. van Andel, in The Hague.
The strategic plan was based on a long and staunch defence of Fortress
Holland. This battle would be fought in allied cooperation with France,
Britain and Belgium. For this plan to succeed, the area within Fortress
Holland would have to be, and remain, entirely in Dutch hands. In ad-
dition, the lines of communication with the allies would have to be kept
open. For the latter part, Winkelman’s attention was mainly focused on
the southern province of Noord-Brabant.
144 chapter five
It was not until around midday that Winkelman had a reliable picture
of the situation. For the first eight or nine hours after his arrival at head-
quarters he could do little other than respond as soon as possible to the
worst reports. Close to home, he was able to take action immediately. Just
after five, Winkelman placed Major General N.T. Carstens’ Ist Corps under
Van Andel’s command and ordered him to eliminate all paratroops and
air-transportable units within Fortress Holland immediately. For this pur-
pose, on the basis of measures taken at the time of the mobilisation, Van
Andel was also given the depot troops based in Fortress Holland. After
the elimination of the German invaders, the Ist Corps would then be avail-
able again as a strategic reserve.
In the hours that followed, it became clear that the enemy had settled
at various locations throughout Fortress Holland. There were Germans at
and around the three airfields at The Hague. The bridges in Rotterdam
and Dordrecht and those near Moerdijk were in German hands, as was
Waalhaven airfield. The enemy landings at that airfield continued all day.
According to Winkelman and Van Andel, this could indicate that airborne
operations were to be expected elsewhere as well. They thought it would
be most likely that there would be actions against Schiphol airport, which
had already been bombed, as a prelude to attacks on Amsterdam and
Haarlem. Van Andel was therefore also given all remaining aircraft. For
that purpose, at around 10.20 hrs, Winkelman placed Lieutenant General
P.W. Best directly under Van Andel’s command. This measure also put the
2nd Aviation Regiment, which was to support the Field Army’s operations
with reconnaissance and air strikes and therefore took its orders from the
Commander of the Field Army, under Van Andel’s command. This way,
all remaining aircraft could be deployed wherever the commander-in-
chief decided the threat was the most serious.
At the same time, the situation in Noord-Brabant required attention.
At 05.00 hrs, the headquarters was phoned by the commander of the IIIrd
Corps, Major General A.A. van Nijnatten, in ’s-Hertogenbosch. He re-
ported that the railway bridge over the Maas at Gennep had fallen into
German hands undamaged, that an armoured train had crossed this
bridge and penetrated the Peel-Raam Position at Mill and that fighting
was in progress within the position. Van Nijnatten was given permission
to direct the 2nd Hussars-Motorcyclist Regiment of the nearby Light Divi-
sion to the scene.
For the next hour and a half, Winkelman reviewed the situation in
Noord-Brabant. If the German breach at Mill were successful, after the
Peel Division, the IIIrd Corps and possibly even the Light Division would
Dutch command structure until 10 May 1940
Commander-in-Chief
of the Land and
Sea Forces
Commander of
Fortress Holland
Commander of the
eastern front of
Fortress Holland
Commander
of the Air Defence
Director of the Staging

and Traffic Service
Commander of the
Commander of II nd Corps
the Field Army
Commander of the
III rd Corps
Territorial
Commander
in Friesland (TBF)
Commander of the Commander of the
IV th Corps Peel Division
Territorial Commander
in southern
Limburg (TBZL) Territorial Commander of the
Commander in Light Division
Overijssel (TBO)
Commander of the
Ist Corps A
Commander of B
Brigade A G
Chief of the
Navy Staff
Commander of the
Commander of the Utrecht-Soesterberg
Den Helder Position Air Defence Sector
Commander Commander of the

in Zeeland (CZ) 2 nd Aviation Regiment
become involved in the fighting. The retreat planned for the following
night would then come to nothing. The Waal-Linge Position, which Van
Nijnatten was to occupy, would then remain empty and as a result the
Valley Position could be attacked from the rear, from the area of the ma-
jor rivers. The Commander of the Field Army had already expressed his
concern over this danger by telephone. Colonel H.C. van der Bijl’s Light
Division must also not be pinned down in combat. That division was to
move to Fortress Holland, to form the strategic reserve there. The German
airborne landings within the Fortress made this manoeuvre even more
146 chapter five
urgent. Reviewing the situation, Winkelman decided at around 06.45 hrs

to order the IIIrd Corps and the Light Division to execute the planned re-
treat immediately, regardless of the risk of air strikes.
Apart from two border battalions in the west of the province, that left
only the Peel Division in Noord-Brabant, under the command of Colonel
L.J. Schmidt. South of the major rivers, the Germans would only encounter
any substantial resistance if the French managed to establish their planned
closed front in Belgium in time and if they were able to extend it to For-
tress Holland. At 06.45 hrs, Winkelman sent a telex to the troops announc-
ing that France, Britain and Belgium were allies. Prior to that moment, the
military attachés of those countries had already visited headquarters and
Winkelman had had a telephone conversation with the allied commander-
in-chief, général M. Gamelin. At around eleven, the military attaché in Par-
is, Lieutenant Colonel D. van Voorst Evekink, made a report by telephone
of a conversation with Gamelin. These conversations revealed that the four
French armies and the British Expeditionary Force, which were positioned
along the Belgian border, would advance to the Dinant–Namur–Louvain–
Antwerp line, so roughly along the rivers Meuse, Dyle and Scheldt. The
furthest to the left of those armies, général d’armée H.H. Giraud’s 7th Army,
had been intended for Noord-Brabant, but for the time being would re-
main with the main force and not advance any further than Antwerp. Only
the advance guards would immediately advance into Noord-Brabant and
Zeeland, over land and sea. The first combined action would be aimed at
recapturing the Moerdijk bridges. The Dutch already had the 6th Border
Battalion on its way there. With a view to future use of the Moerdijk bridg-
es by French troops on their way to Fortress Holland, Winkelman ordered
the Dutch artillery in the Hoekse Waard not to destroy the bridges with
shell fire. In order to coordinate the operations in the longer term, Game-
lin and Winkelman announced the sending of military missions.
One of the results of the Franco-Dutch consultations was that the
Commander of the Peel Division was informed of the imminent French
arrival at the end of the morning. Schmidt’s relief on receiving this mes-
sage was tempered considerably by the announcement by the headquar-
ters’ Chief of Operations, Lieutenant Colonel J.J.C.P. Wilson, that nothing
at all had been arranged with regard to the cooperation with the French,
so he would have to do that himself.
While Winkelman set his hopes on Colonel Schmidt for the Peel-
Raam Position, the recapture of the Moerdijk bridges and the cooperation
with Giraud, it was time to return to the problems within Fortress Hol-
land. The greatest threat came from the Moerdijk–Dordrecht–Rotterdam
Series of telex messages of 9 and 10 May
1940 (right); The destroyed rail and
road bridges at Zutphen (below).
148 chapter five
axis, the latter city in particular. After all, from Rotterdam the Germans
would be able to push through to The Hague. Rotterdam comprised two
threats, Waalhaven airfield and the Maas bridges. At Waalhaven, the con-
tinuing supply of German reinforcements had to be stopped. Air strikes
were carried out to that end and Van Andel also had the artillery launch
an attack from Hillegersberg. Recapture of the airfield would, however, be
preferable. The nearest force was the Light Division, which by now was
entering Fortress Holland. In anticipation of further assignments, Win-
kelman had already put the division under Van Andel’s command, again
expanding his authority. At the end of the afternoon, Van Andel ordered
Colonel Van der Bijl to have his division cross the bridge over the Noord
at Alblasserdam. He was then to make his way via IJsselmonde to Waal-
haven and recapture the airfield. The attack was to be supported by the 3rd
Border Battalion, which was to advance from Beijerland across the bridge
at Barendrecht. In the meantime, the British and French air forces would
hopefully respond to Winkelman’s request to bomb Waalhaven airfield.
An attack was as yet not an option for the Maas bridges, as the Light
Division had not arrived yet. On the north bank of the Maas, near the
bridges, the defence had to be organised, which at the time was being im-
provised by only depot troops and a few units of marines. As he no longer
had any own reserves left, the next day Winkelman had the Field Army
provide Van Andel with two regiments of infantry and an artillery battery.
One of those regiments went to Rotterdam.
Thus at around midday, Winkelman had made the first decisions re-
garding the three main strategic issues, security within Fortress Holland,
the defence of Noord-Brabant and allied cooperation. All these issues
boiled down to the same thing, stopping the German advance and creat-
ing the conditions for a sustained and staunch defence of Fortress Hol-
land. The coming hours and days would show whether the actions or-
dered had had the desired effects. The developments in the afternoon and
evening of 10 May gave cause for cautious optimism.
There had been few reports from the northern provinces, but it had
been established that the Wons Position was still intact. At Zutphen, the
German advance guards were crossing the IJssel, but on 10 May they
came to a standstill at the Apeldoorn Canal. The Grebbe Line was there-
fore completely untouched. Only at Wageningen did the first Germans
appear in front of the position, late in the afternoon, but they did not at-
tack it. The Commander in Zeeland, Rear Admiral H.J. van der Stad, re-
ported from Middelburg that a French motorised division was on its way
to Noord-Brabant, via Zeeuws-Vlaanderen, Walcheren and Zuid-Beve-
land. Royal Navy ships were arriving at Flushing, the Hook of Holland
and IJmuiden. Although they were only setting demolition parties ashore,
the important thing was that the British were getting involved. They also
promised bombing raids on Waalhaven airfield. In some places at Ypen-
burg, Ockenburg, and Valkenburg, the Germans were pulling back into
defensive positions, blocked off by Dutch units.
The IIIrd Corps took up a safe position behind the Maas in the early
evening, without having suffered any major losses. In the course of the
night, it would cross the Waal. That meant that the Waal-Linge Position
would be occupied on 11 May. The Light Division had similar news to
report. It arrived in the Alblasserwaard in the afternoon. Colonel Van der
Bijl considered the situation at the bridge over the Noord too uncertain to
have his troops cross the bridge immediately. He would therefore not be
able to participate in the attack on Waalhaven airfield until the next morn-
ing. This was not good news, because on that vital Rotterdam–Moerdijk
axis, Winkelman suffered another blow. At the end of the afternoon, the
6th Border Battalion reported that it had failed to eliminate the German
bridgehead on the south bank of the Hollands Diep at Moerdijk.
A second attack would have to wait for reinforcements to arrive,
French reinforcements. Those reinforcements were on their way, however.
Winkelman received a message from Paris at 21.00 hrs that Gamelin had
ordered Giraud’s army to press on to the area between Breda and Tilburg,
if possible. Gamelin insisted that if the Dutch troops at the Peel-Raam Po-
sition were to retreat, that they also retreat to a line at Tilburg or Breda.
An hour later, Winkelman was faced with that retreat. Colonel Schmidt
phoned General Headquarters to announce that a German division at Mill
had opened the attack and that a breach of the Peel-Raam Position was
imminent. He also thought that the southern end of the position was be-
ing outflanked over Belgian territory. For that reason, and because the IIIrd
Corps and the Light Division had reached safety, he wanted to abandon
the position and continue the fight behind the Zuid-Willemsvaart Canal.
Headquarters reconciled itself to Schmidt’s proposal and Schmidt imme-
diately ordered the retreat.
For General Headquarters, 10 May was a tense day. By the evening, it
could be established that the first blow had generally been dealt with well.
The planned strategy was still feasible. Winkelman realised that the Ger-
mans had so far made more progress than he and his staff had assumed
beforehand. He did not, however, consider it impossible to halt the Ger-
man advance.
150 chapter five
Düsseldorf, Saturday 11 May 1940
For Army Group B, the night of 10 May 1940 passed without incident.
The excellent communications system meant that all major units were
well aware of the favourable situation. The 9th Panzer Division was pre-
paring to press on to the Moerdijk bridges, in accordance with its orders.
As the bridges over the Maas at Grave and Ravenstein, which the divi-
sion was counting on, had been blown up, however, they had to use two
Kriegsbrücken, a 16-tonne pontoon bridge at Gennep and an 8-tonne pon-
toon bridge at Mook. This meant that the Panzer division had to advance
through two infantry divisions of the XXVIth Corps, which were also to
make use of the bridges, before it reached the Maas. This resulted in huge
traffic jams at the bridges, worsened by clumsy, improvised traffic control.
The first units of the 9th Panzer Division did not cross the Maas at Gennep
until 04.50 hrs. By the time they arrived at Mill, the Peel-Raam Position
had been abandoned. During the further advance that day, again it was not
Dutch resistance that proved the greatest problem, but the limited capacity
of the road network in this thinly populated area. The advance guard did
not reach Volkel until 08.20 hrs and it was three quarters of an hour later
before it reported in neighbouring Uden. The advance from the Maas, just
over twenty kilometres by road, had taken four hours and fifteen minutes.
In the meantime, the SS Verfügungsdivision had also been ordered to com-
mence its advance. As this division also had to cross the bridge at Gen-
nep, the traffic chaos there became worse and worse. This unstructured
course of events annoyed Generaloberst von Bock and that morning he
went to Gennep and Mill in the Peel-Raam Position, to see the situation
for himself. He then had a meeting with the Kommandierende General of
the XXVIth Corps, Wodrig, whom he ordered to do everything necessary
to enable the 9th Panzer Division to cross the bridges at Mook and Gennep
as quickly as possible. Von Bock then left for the command post of von
Küchler’s 18th Army, which was still in Wesel, also to discuss the traffic situ-
ation at the XXVIth Corps. On the way there, von Bock was told that enemy
columns had been sighted on the roads from Antwerp to Breda. He wrote
in his journal: “So here come the scoundrels already!”3
In Wesel, von Bock was received by the Chief of Staff of the 18th Army,
Generalmajor Erich Marcks. They soon agreed that the 9th Panzer Divi-
sion should cross the Zuid-Willemsvaart Canal as soon as possible. The
approaching French troops posed a risk to the paratroops at the Moerdijk
3 Ibidem, 11 May 1940.

Lange Voorhout 7. In May 1940, the building housed the General Headquarters
of the Commander-in-Chief of the Land and Sea Forces, General H.G. Winkelman.
bridges. Von Bock therefore had a request sent to General der Flieger Al-
bert Kesselring’s Air Fleet 2 to delay the French advance by attacking, and
if possible destroying, the columns from the air. Von Bock and Marcks
had sufficient faith in the Luftwaffe to hold on to their expectation that
the 9th Panzer Division would reach the Moerdijk bridges on time, that
is the next day. Then von Bock spoke with Generaloberst von Reichenau,
to hear about the 6th Army’s progress. In the night of 10 May, pontoon
bridges had been laid at Maastricht for the 4th Panzer Division. By the end
of the morning, the capitulation of Fort Eben Emael was reported. A pas-
sage had been forced across the Albert Canal. Von Bock therefore ordered
von Reichenau to have the 4th Panzer Division advance as far as possible
into Belgium that same day, via Tongeren.
Von Bock then informed the Oberbefehlshaber des Heeres, General-
oberst Walther von Brauchitsch, by telephone of the latest developments.
During that conversation, he indicated that he expected that, contrary to
what had been assumed so far, the Dutch army would mount a staunch
defence of the Grebbe Line. He no longer expected any quick successes
from the 227th Infantry Division, because the main force of this division
was slow to cross the IJssel, across a pontoon bridge at Zutphen, and its
advance guards had only just begun crossing the Apeldoorn Canal. The
SS regiment ‘Adolf Hitler’, the only completely motorised part of the divi-
152 chapter five
sion, was therefore removed from the division, and attached to the reserve
of Army Group B, in anticipation of a new assignment. Von Bock then
decided that the majority of the reserve should be positioned behind the
6th Army’s southern flank. A number of other reserve units, including the
SS regiment which had just been made available, were positioned behind
the XXVIth Corps. These decisions meant that von Bock was strengthen-
ing the main efforts of the 6th Army (advance via Maastricht–Tongeren)
and the 18th Army (advance through Noord-Brabant). The prepared plans
could easily be executed. Possible countermeasures from the Dutch and
Belgian armies, which were considered to be weak, played no role in these
decisions. Only the French threat to the bridgehead at Moerdijk had led to
some extra measures.
In the afternoon of 11 May, the Chief of Staff of the Oberkommando des
Heeres, General Halder, decided that, in view of the troops’ progress, the
command post of Armeekommando 18 was too far behind the front line
and put pressure on von Küchler to move to a new location, further west.
At 14.20 hrs, the Oberbefehlshaber des Heeres, Generaloberst von Brau-
chitsch, conveyed to von Bock, through his Chief of Staff Halder, the deci-
sion that Generalkommando XXXIX, under the command of General der
Panzertruppen Rudolf Schmidt, would be put at the disposal of the 18th
Army. As had been anticipated during the preparations for the campaign,
this staff would be able to become operational when the XXVIth Corps
had arrived in the area of Breda and decisions had to be made regarding
the continuation of the battle against Fortress Holland, the Belgian posi-
tions at Antwerp and a possible British threat from Zeeland. That same
afternoon, Hitler visited the Oberkommando des Heeres at Euskirchen and
was very pleased with the overall progress.
The Hague, Saturday 11 May 1940
On the morning of 11 May, Winkelman first turned his attention to Rot-

terdam. After all, that was where the Light Division was to attempt to re-
capture Waalhaven airfield. It had to be possible on this day to regain the
initiative at at least one of the points on the road from Noord-Brabant to
Rotterdam. If the whole road could then be cleared, the link-up with the
allied front in Belgium and Brabant would be established.
Initially, Colonel Van der Bijl’s reports were not unfavourable. De-
spite fairly strong German resistance, small groups from his division had
reached the other side of the Noord in two places. That was as far as Van
der Bijl could go, however. By mid-morning he reported having had to
Dutch command structure from the evening of 10 May 1940
Commander-in-Chief
of the Land and
Sea Forces
Commander of
Fortress Holland
Commander of the
Director of the Staging Commander of the I st Corps
and Traffic Service eastern front of
Fortress Holland
Commander of the
Commander of the Light Division
Field Army Territorial Commander
in Overijssel Commander of the
(TBO) Air Defence
Territorial Commander Commander of the

in Noord-Brabant IInd Corps
and
Commander
of the Peel Division Commander of the
III rd Corps
Chief of the
Navy Staff Commander of the
IV th Corps
Commander of the
A
Den Helder Position Commander of B
Brigade A G
Territorial
Commander
in Friesland (TBF)
Commander
in Zeeland (CZ)
pull his troops back onto the east bank again, under German pressure. At
around the same time, General Headquarters was informed that the at-
tack on the bridges at Dordrecht by a battalion of the Kil Group had also
failed. In addition, the 3rd Border Battalion had not succeeded in reaching
Waalhaven either. In order to deal with all these setbacks at once, Van An-
del set a new assignment for Colonel Van der Bijl. The Light Division was
now to have its main force cross from the Alblasserwaard to the Island of
Dordrecht, clear up the German positions there, then advance by means
of the ferry at Wieldrecht to the bridge at Barendrecht in order to mount
an attack on Waalhaven airfield from there.
Column of Dutch soldiers resting. Rotterdam, May 1940.
General H.G. Winkelman at his desk at Lange Voorhout 7, The Hague.

There was little news from the Field Army in the morning. Aerial re-
connaissance over the Veluwe and skirmishes on the ground indicated that
only German advance guards had crossed the Apeldoorn Canal. There was
more going on, however, between Wageningen and the Grebbeberg. There,
the line’s outpost sector was being attacked. For Brigade A in the Betuwe,
the situation was relatively calm. Brigade B, from the Land van Maas en
Waal area, positioned itself at Wijk bij Duurstede on both sides of the Lek,
as a reserve for the Grebbe Line. According to plan, the IIIrd Corps took
up positions along the Waal and the Linge and was reinforced with troops
from Brigade G, which was present in the area. The Field Army had thus
completed the planned manoeuvres without any major problems.
At 11.00 hrs, Winkelman visited Van Andel at his staff quarters to hear
at first hand how the battle within Fortress Holland was progressing. The
situation on the whole was stable, albeit that Van Andel was as yet unable
to provide detailed information on the strength of the Germans within
the Fortress. Counterattacks on the German positions were being pre-
pared or had already been carried out, albeit without success so far. Only
Rotterdam was a cause for concern. At Overschie, to the north of the city,
there was a gradually increasing concentration of airborne units, occupy-
ing the road between Rotterdam and The Hague. They were preventing a
rapid response to developments in Rotterdam, particularly if the German
troops were to try to breach the Dutch defence at the bridges. Given the
number of aircraft that had landed at Waalhaven, Van Andel concluded
that by now there should be some 6,000 men on the ground there. There
was a nervous atmosphere in Rotterdam, as well as elsewhere in Fortress
Holland, particularly in the large cities. There were constant reports of
new paratroop landings, shootings and fifth-column activities. All these
reports had to be checked. Usually they were false alarms, but the many
patrols were nevertheless exhausting the troops.
Upon his arrival back at General Headquarters, at around midday
Winkelman was phoned by the commander of the Peel Division, Colo-
nel Schmidt. Schmidt and the French commanders on site at various lo-
cations in Noord-Brabant and the Belgian-Dutch border region had held
discussions during the night and had come up with a plan for the com-
bined defence. The front was to run from the Maas at ’s-Hertogenbosch to
Tilburg, and from there via Goirle and Hilvarenbeek to the Belgian posi-
tions to the east of Turnhout. After leaving the position along the Zuid-
Willemsvaart Canal, the Peel Division would occupy the northern sector
of this line and take up position between Tilburg and ’s-Hertogenbosch.
Winkelman would, however, have to take into account that the French
156 chapter five
main force would still need another three to four days to move from Flan-
ders to Brabant.
For General Headquarters this was important, and on the whole
good, news. The build-up of the French front was reassuring in any case.
Whether the Peel Division would be able to successfully carry out another
change of position so soon after arriving at the Zuid-Willemsvaart Canal
remained to be seen. Schmidt could give few guarantees in that respect, as
he had to admit to not having much control over his troops anymore.
By now, it was very important for Winkelman that the Peel Division
build up a well-organised front in the agreed area. If they did not succeed,
there would be a gap to the north of the French part of the front, through
which the German troops would be able to push on to western Brabant
and Moerdijk. In the afternoon of 11 May, therefore, Winkelman asked
the British government in London to send at least two divisions to Zee-
land or Brabant and also to carry out air strikes on Waalhaven airfield. He
asked the French high command to have the troops operating in Brabant
push through decisively to Moerdijk. The latter request he also conveyed
through the Commander in Zeeland, Van der Stad, to the French units in
his area of command.
Headquarters was unable, however, to obtain a clear picture of the al-
lied cooperation, let alone direct that cooperation. At 14.15 hrs, the Com-
mander of the Field Army, J.J.G. baron Van Voorst tot Voorst, reported
that he could no longer establish contact with Schmidt. The only report
on the situation in Belgium was that the position along the Albert Canal
was in danger of collapsing. All Winkelman heard about Noord-Brabant,
via Van Andel, was that a French detachment had been sighted in Wille-
mstad and Klundert. Its commander, however, was not willing to take on
the German bridgehead at Moerdijk.
Winkelman and his staff were of the opinion that they had a better grip
on events during the second day of war than on the first. In and around
Fortress Holland, the situation was stabilising. The airborne units near
The Hague no longer posed a direct threat and the Germans were making
no progress on the Rotterdam–Moerdijk axis. Although it was also true
that the Dutch troops were not gaining in the latter area of operations ei-
ther, that might change the next day if the Light Division carried out its
new assignments successfully. That success was closely connected with the
fighting in Noord-Brabant, where the build-up of a Franco-Dutch front
appeared to be only a matter of time. On the basis of the information
available to Winkelman, strategically speaking the situation was more fa-
vourable at the end of the second day than it had been in the evening of
10 May.
On 10 May and much of 11 May, the Grebbe Line did not play a large
part in the decision-making at General Headquarters. The line was not yet
in any danger. That changed somewhat in the evening of 11 May, when
Van Voorst tot Voorst reported that the Grebbeberg was being attacked by
weak German units and that nevertheless the outposts had been lost. The
Grebbeberg itself came under artillery fire. In the coming night, a coun-
terattack would be carried out to recapture the outposts. In the meantime,
the Commander of the Field Army warned that if the resistance in the
main line of defence were not stronger than had been the case with the
outposts, the enemy would breach the position.
Düsseldorf, Sunday 12 May 1940
On 12 May, it became clear to the German army leadership that there

was no actual threat from Antwerp towards the direction of Breda. In the
first place, German aerial reconnaissance had shown that no large-scale
landings of British troops were taking place or were to be expected on the
Dutch coast, as had been feared. In the second place, the reconnaissance
showed that the presence of the French troops in the Breda area was as
yet negligible. The Luftwaffe apparently had done a good job. The planned
operations could therefore be carried out. At 09.05 hrs von Bock sent a
telex to von Küchler, again urging him to make contact that day with the
units of the airborne corps at the bridgehead at Moerdijk. The units of
the XXVIth Corps that were not involved in the further attack on Fortress
Holland were to build up a defensive front against Antwerp. Meanwhile,
the 9th Panzer Division was making better progress than the previous day.
One of its columns had reached Loon op Zand as early as 07.50 hrs, and
was advancing towards Geertruidenberg.
On the basis of the reports coming in, the Chief of Staff of the 18th
Army, Generalmajor Marcks, concluded that the expected crisis situation
at Breda would not develop after all. Even if a British landing were still
to take place, it would be too late, and the French deployment in west-
ern Brabant was also too slow to be able to stop the XXVIth Corps. It was
still necessary, however, to issue orders to this corps for the continuation
of operations after reaching Breda. In the meantime, the staff of the 18th
Army, succumbing to pressure from Halder, was preparing to move the
command post from Wesel to Uden. In the early evening, a report reached
158 chapter five
von Küchler’s staff that the 9th Panzer Division had made contact with the
German paratroops at the Moerdijk bridges at around 15.20 hrs. It was
noted with satisfaction in the journal of the 18th Army: “On the evening
of the third day of war, the army has completed the most important part
of its assignment.”4 The developments at the Xth Corps at the Veluwe were
followed passively by the staff of the 18th Army, while the combat actions
of the 1st Cavalry Division in the north of the Netherlands received no at-
tention at all from the army.
Von Bock was not very pleased with the situation at the 6th Army that
day. Although the crossings over the Maas and the Albert Canal, at Maas-
tricht and Eben Emael respectively, had now been forced, the forts at
Liège were still putting up resistance. Although the plan was to have the
main force of the 6th Army advance further, with units separating from
that force to conquer the forts, it was undesirable to have an enemy pock-
et of resistance in the army’s own rear area. As there was no information
coming in about the exact situation, von Bock went to Tongeren to be in-
formed by von Reichenau and to discuss the further course of the opera-
tions. At 19.50 hrs, the Chief of Staff of Army Group B, Generalleutnant
Hans von Salmuth, reported to the Chief of Staff of the Oberbefehlshaber
des Heeres, General Halder, on the progress made by the 6th Army and the
8th Army. They also discussed the continuation of the battle in Noord-Bra-
bant. They could not make any decisions yet, however, about the further
actions to be taken by the 9th Panzer Division, because they did not have
the authority to do so.
The decision was made later during personal consultations between
their superiors, von Brauchitsch and von Bock. They agreed that, now that
a wedge had been driven between Fortress Holland and the Belgian de-
fence line along the Albert Canal, the campaign would be split up into
two separate operations. One would involve advancing over the Moerdijk
bridge to Rotterdam and the other would entail the capture of Zeeland
and Antwerp followed by crossing the Scheldt. These two assignments
were to be carried out by different army corps, to avoid the execution of
the one task detracting from the other. Therefore von Brauchitsch and von
Bock decided to make use of General der Panzertruppen Rudolf Schmidt’s
Generalkommando XXXIX, which, after all, had been put at the disposal
of the 18th Army the previous day. This corps staff would carry out the at-
tack on Fortress Holland, and to that end was given under its command
Student’s Airborne Corps, including the 22nd Air Transportable Division,
4 Kriegstagebuch 18. Armee, 12 May 1940, in: BA-MA, N 126/19.

or however much of it remained, the 9th Panzer Division, the 254th Infan-
try Division and the SS regiment ‘Adolf Hitler’. General Wodrig’s XXVIth
Corps would form a front against Antwerp, with the remaining 256th In-
fantry Division, the SS Verfügungsdivision and infantry divisions from
the reserves of Army Group B. With the attack on Antwerp coming ever
closer, the coordination between the right flank of the 6th Army and the
left flank of the XXVIth Corps was requiring more and more effort from
von Bock and the staff of Army Group B. This pushed the developments
at Generalleutnant Kurt Student’s Airborne Corps inside Fortress Holland
and at the Xth Corps at the Grebbe Line to the background somewhat for
Army Group B.
The Hague, Sunday 12 May 1940
The third day of the war was to belong to Winkelman’s subordinate com-
manders. General Headquarters felt it had gained a hold on events over
the last two days. The main thing now was to gain decisive advantages in
the various theatres of operations. Winkelman and his men would have to
wait for that outcome before they could make any decisions on the further
course of operations.
There was an important part to play for the Light Division. In the
course of the day, however, Van der Bijl had little progress to report. The
Island of Dordrecht had not yet been cleared out, and by no means had
an advance to Waalhaven airfield been effected. It took a long time for
Van Andel to realise that this was not so much owing to a weak perform-
ance by the troops, but to the unclear command structure at Dordrecht.
In what was only a small area, three different officers were in command.
The three officers were working at cross purposes and meddling in each
other’s business. In the early evening, Van Andel clarified the command
structure and decided that the Light Division should be ready no later
than the early morning of 13 May at the Wieldrecht ferry to carry out the
push to Waalhaven airfield. Van Andel had had reports from both the Kil
Group and the Light Division of armoured units on the road between
Moerdijk and Dordrecht. On the basis of statements from General Head-
quarters, he assumed they were French tanks.
In Fortress Holland, the situation on the whole remained unchanged.
Winkelman’s only measures here concerned Rotterdam. Since the morn-
ing of 10 May, around six battalions had been sent to Rotterdam and the
staff of the local commander, Colonel P.W. Scharroo, was not prepared for
the work that that entailed. The Chief of the Operations Section of Gen-
Princess Juliana
and her daughter
Princess Beatrix
arrive in London,
13 May 1940
(left); en route
to England,
Princess Irene
travelled in
a gas-proof
carry-cot,
carried here by
Prince Bernhard
on arrival in
London (below).
The Commander-in-Chief
leaving the Ministry of Defence
at Plein 4 in The Hague, after
consultations with the Minister
of Defence, A.Q.H. Dijxhoorn,
on 12 May 1940.
eral Headquarters, Lieutenant Colonel J.J.C.P. Wilson, was subsequently

sent to Scharroo, together with a number of other officers. Having arrived
in Rotterdam, Wilson judged the situation to be more favourable than he
had expected. He therefore asked Winkelman for a fresh battalion with
which to mount an attack and at least recapture the Maas bridges.
In the course of the day, things began to get serious along the Grebbe
Line. In the IVth Corps’ sector the activity was limited to some minor fight-
ing. The IInd Corps, however, and particularly its IVth Division had more to
report. The attempt to recapture the outpost sector at the Grebbeberg had
been abandoned prematurely. On the other hand, a small German unit had
penetrated the main resistance sector that afternoon. Immediate counter-
attacks were to no avail. Preparations were already under way, however, for
a better organised and larger-scale counterattack on 13 May.
Lastly, 12 May brought news from the northern provinces. The Ger-
mans had breached the Wons Position, after which the Dutch troops
162 chapter five
prepared themselves for a possible German attack at the head of the

IJsselmeer Dam. The navy Chief of Staff formed an IJsselmeer flotilla
to counter attempts by the Germans to cross over from the Frisian IJs-
selmeer coast. To be on the safe side, vigilance was stepped up in Noord-
Holland as well.
Of much greater importance, however, was the fact that there was one
theatre of operations from which no reports were coming in whatsoever
on 12 May, namely Noord-Brabant. Since the telephone conversation with
Schmidt at around midday on 11 May, nothing further had been heard
from the area. In order to gain insight into the situation, Winkelman or-
dered a three-man military mission to go to Noord-Brabant in the early
afternoon and re-establish communications with the commanders there.
This was not much help as yet, because it would be the next day before the
three officers reported back and by then their assignment had been over-
taken by events. General Headquarters continued to assume on 12 May
that the Franco-Dutch front was in the process of being built up and that
the recapture of the German bridgehead at Moerdijk could be expected
soon. Not that there were no signs to the contrary, but they were difficult
to interpret correctly. For instance, Van der Stad reported from Middel-
burg that parts of the Peel Division were in disarray and seeking safety
in his sector. Van Andel heard from headquarters about armoured units
in the Langstraat. It was unclear whether these were German or French
tanks. A broadcast by Radio Bremen put an end to that uncertainty at
eleven in the evening. In that broadcast, the German army leadership an-
nounced that its tank units had reached the Moerdijk bridges and were
penetrating Fortress Holland.
On the third day of battle, the Dutch prospects had therefore wors-
ened considerably. It had not proved possible to retake the initiative any-
where. The allied cooperation threatened to become a fiasco. The French
in Noord-Brabant had German tank units on their northern flank, cut-
ting off their route to Fortress Holland. From now on, with the exception
of isolated Zeeland, the battle would centre on holding Fortress Holland.
The prospects, however, were not favourable. The Light Division’s failure
had laid the road to Rotterdam open for the Germans. If they managed
to cross the Maas in or near Rotterdam, The Hague would be under im-
mediate threat. The danger could also come from other directions. The
situation at the Grebbeberg was uncertain. The outcome of the planned
counterattack there the next day would be decisive.
The new situation required new measures to be taken. Now that there
was no chance of the French entering Fortress Holland, Winkelman or-
dered the Kil Group to open artillery fire on the Moerdijk bridges. Colo-
nel Scharroo was ordered to advance onto the Maas bridges and set dem-
olition charges under them. That night, code word Irene was also issued,
the signal to destroy the oil reserves at Pernis. In view of the deteriorat-
ing situation, Winkelman had to consider whether the safety of the Royal
Family could be guaranteed any longer. Prince Bernhard, Princess Juliana
and their two children had left for England via IJmuiden that evening.
Evacuating the Queen had also been discussed on 12 May by Winkelman
and the cabinet, but not yet considered necessary. It was perhaps time to
reconsider that decision.
Düsseldorf, Monday 13 May 1940
As the operations being carried out by the XXVIth Corps at Rotterdam

and the Xth Corps at the Grebbe Line were going according to plan, the
staff of Army Group B was not very interested in the battle for Fortress
Holland this day. At 08.50 hrs von Bock had informed Halder and von
Brauchitsch again in detail about the progress of the battle. Apart from
that, however, von Bock still focused most of his attention on the devel-
opments at the 6th Army. The ongoing battle at Liège was worrying him
greatly. The thought of the delay which these forts had caused the German
army in 1914 did not reassure von Bock, given that the 6th Army was mak-
ing little progress in eliminating them. He therefore asked Air Fleet 2 for
increased tactical air support for the 6th Army. To facilitate the build-up of
the front against Antwerp by the XXVIth Corps and in preparation for the
attack on Zeeland, he asked Kesselring to have Stuka attacks carried out
on enemy columns at Breda and Roosendaal. The main effort of the air
support was with the XVIth Panzer Corps, which had been formed at the
6th Army on 11 May from the 4th Panzer Division, the 3rd Panzer Division,
which had been brought forward, and the 20th Infantry Division (motor-
ised). The unit as a whole was under the command of Generaloberst Erich
Hoepner. In the afternoon, the Luftwaffe reported that the threat at Liège
had been dealt with and this was confirmed by the 6th Army.
For the 18th Army, this day showed signs of the end of the battle for
Fortress Holland approaching. At 05.20 hrs, the first vehicles of the main
force of the 9th Panzer Division crossed the Moerdijk bridge. At around
06.50 hrs, commander Schmidt of Generalkommando XXXIX arrived in
Wesel, where part of the staff of the 18th Army was still present. Schmidt’s
appearance prompted von Bock to note in his journal that finally the
164 chapter five
corps was on its way, “which I have been asking for for months”.5 Schmidt
was given the assignment, which had been drawn up for him some days
earlier, to take the XXXIXth Corps and penetrate Fortress Holland. Before
Schmidt could get started, however, there was still a great deal to be done.
He and a number of staff officers had travelled in a staff car from his base
in Jena, south-west of Leipzig. The rest of this corps staff and the corps
troops would not arrive in the theatre of war from Jena until much later.
For the time being, he would therefore have to manage with what Student
could offer him. Another problem was that he did not know the precise
locations of the units that were to be placed under his command, or their
command posts. His only option was to go looking for them. It was not
until the early morning of 14 May, when he moved into his command
post in Rijsoord near Rotterdam, that he gained some hold on his corps.
There, however, he was faced with a new problem. Communications with
the command post of the 18th Army were not functioning properly. This
obstacle would not be removed before the Dutch capitulation. This was
of immediate consequence for Schmidt’s command of the air force units
in his corps, the Airborne Corps, given that the liaison with General der
Flieger Kesselring ran through a liaison officer at the headquarters of the
18th Army. This problem would become even more acute if tactical air
support were needed for the battle at Rotterdam.
Rotterdam was not the only option for penetrating Fortress Holland,
however. An opportunity seemed to be opening up at the Grebbe Line as
well. The Xth Corps, which the army group had moved to the background
of the picture somewhat over the past days, would, with support from the
Stukas of Squadron 4, attempt at 13.20 hrs to breach the Grebbe Line at
Rhenen and advance to Fortress Holland via Utrecht. The Fortress would
then only be protected by the New Dutch Waterline. The question was
therefore raised at the headquarters of 18th Army that afternoon as to what
General Winkelman’s plans could be. According to the 18. Armeeoberkom-
mando, there were two possibilities. Either the Dutch troops would retreat
behind the New Dutch Waterline and continue defending Fortress Hol-
land from there, or they would block the German break-in at the Grebbe
Line. In either case, the Dutch army would staunchly defend Rotterdam.
The second option, a continuation of the defence at the Grebbe Line,
seemed the most likely to von Küchler’s staff and that therefore formed
the basis for the next day’s orders for the attack.
In the afternoon of 13 May, Army Group B and the 18th Army were
conducting a similar analysis of the situation, based on the question as to
5 Kriegstagebuch Fedor von Bock, 13 May 1940, in: BA-MA, N 22/5.
The blocked entrance to the harbour of IJmuiden.
Panzerkampfwagens III link up with paratroops at Tweede Tol in the early hours of 13 May.
166 chapter five
how the XXXIXth Corps was to continue the battle on 14 May. Von Küch-
ler and von Bock soon agreed that the resistance at the Grebbe Line would
soon be overcome and that the Dutch Field Army would then pull back
to the New Dutch Waterline. According to von Küchler, that movement
would mean Winkelman concentrating his troops at Utrecht in order to
block the advance routes to The Hague. He therefore wanted to have the
XXXIXth Corps advance from Rotterdam via Gouda to Utrecht in order
to catch the majority of the Dutch Field Army in a pincer movement. Von
Bock, on the other hand, expected Winkelman to have the Dutch army
retreat along the Amersfoort–Amsterdam axis, in order to defend the cap-
ital as a last bulwark. After the breach at Rotterdam, the battle would then
also have to be continued along the Gouda–Leiden axis towards Amster-
dam. If the attack were to concentrate on Utrecht, there was a danger of
part of the Dutch army escaping to Amsterdam. Von Küchler, however,
would not give in and von Bock sent von Salmuth to his stubborn sub-
ordinate commander to convince him that he was wrong. He continued
to resist, however, after which von Bock decided that the boundaries of
the subordinate commander’s own responsibility had been reached and at
23.35 hrs he personally ordered von Küchler to change his plans.
No matter how the 18th Army decided to complete the conquest of the
Netherlands, it was beyond any doubt that the Dutch capitulation was im-
minent. It was therefore time to make preparations to that effect. In the
evening of 13 May, therefore, the Chief of Staff of the 18th Army, General-
major Erich Marcks, asked the Head of the Operations Division of Army
Group B, Oberst Wilhelm Hasse, what should be done when the Neth-
erlands capitulated. Who should conduct the negotiations with Winkel-
man and what would the position of the Dutch soldiers be? Should they
be considered prisoners of war? That would become clear the next day.
The Hague, Monday 13 May 1940
The fourth day began early for the commander-in-chief. That night, Win-
kelman had visited both the Queen at Noordeinde Palace and the mem-
bers of the cabinet who were at Bezuidenhoutseweg 30, where the Council
of Ministers had been meeting since 10 May. Winkelman set out the state
of the country. It was, although not yet hopeless, nonetheless very serious.
The ministers concluded that the Queen should leave the country imme-
diately. At first, Winkelman resisted, fearing the effect such a step would
have on the morale of the troops, but in the end he concurred with the
cabinet’s point of view. The Queen also came to the conclusion that her
German vehicles in the streets of war-torn Rhenen.
departure was unavoidable. At around nine, she left The Hague to board a
British destroyer at the Hook of Holland.6
Later that morning, Winkelman and all the members of the cabinet
discussed the situation again. The main question now was whether to give
up the fight or not. There was a difference of opinion, but after a heated
debate the ministers followed the commander-in-chief ’s advice to keep
going. They urged Winkelman, however, not to make needless sacrifices.
On the basis of this rather vague guideline, therefore, the commander-in-
chief had to decide when the weapons would be laid down. For the time
being, Winkelman took this as a mandate to continue fighting. At the
same time, however, he bore in mind the possibility that communications
between headquarters and the subordinate commanders could be cut off
as a result of the fighting. With this in mind, the latter were given secret
instructions, which entailed, inter alia, that commanders who became cut
off had to assume that the government would not cease the resistance un-
der any condition. The word was ‘hold fast to the last man’.
6 For a polemic review of the departure of Queen Wilhelmina, see N. van der Zee, Om
erger te voorkomen.��
De
��
voorgeschiedenis en uitvoering van de vernietiging van het Nederland-
se jodendom tijdens de Tweede Wereldoorlog (Amsterdam, 1997) 141-153. C. Fasseur, Queen
Wilhelmina’s biographer, uses persuasive arguments to counter Van der Zee’s conclusion
that the Queen’s departure contributed indirectly to the destruction of the Dutch Jews. See
C. Fasseur, Wilhelmina. Krijgshaftig in een vormeloze jas (Amsterdam, 2001) 20-24.
168 chapter five
Along the same lines, Winkelman had already taken measures earlier
that morning. Major General Carstens was summoned to headquarters at
05.00 hrs, where he was ordered to establish an antitank front around The
Hague to stop any tanks advancing from Rotterdam. Closely connected
still to the threat at Rotterdam were the actions of the Light Division. It
had been in action almost constantly since 10 May, without having been
able to turn the tide on the southern front of Fortress Holland. By now, on
13 May, that was looking less likely than ever. Van der Bijl’s division was
worn out and, with German tanks now on their way, was faced with a rap-
idly strengthening enemy. With permission from General Headquarters,
all Dutch troops evacuated the Island of Dordrecht in the course of the day.
The situation on his front, which was rapidly becoming critical, raised
questions for Colonel Scharroo, the cantonment commander of Rotter-
dam. So far the exchanges of fire across the Maas had had little effect on
the city and its population. Now, however, tanks and artillery were ap-
proaching and the risk of a German breach was increasing. If it were to
come to street battles and artillery shelling, parts of the city ran the risk of
being destroyed. Could that risk be taken and what was his troops’ task,
Scharroo wondered. Winkelman himself spoke to Scharroo about this.
The commander-in-chief let his decision be guided by the conclusions he
had drawn earlier that day from his consultations with the Queen and the
cabinet. As long as all means of defence had not yet been exhausted, he
considered fighting on to be worthwhile. Winkelman therefore ordered
Scharroo to defend Rotterdam staunchly and to hold the city to the last
man. Evacuation of the city’s population was not discussed.
The will to stand firm was also decisive in Winkelman’s stance regarding
the navy. Vice Admiral J.Th. Furstner was under the command of the com-
mander-in-chief insofar as the fleet’s contribution to the battle on land was
concerned. Winkelman had nothing to do with the ships that were not in-
volved. They were under the direct command of Furstner in his capacity as
commander of the naval forces. As early as 10 May, the navy leadership had
taken measures in case the motherland was occupied and the battle had to
be continued elsewhere. From that day, various warships which were not
significant for the land war crossed the North Sea to Britain. When Furst-
ner realised on 13 May that things were going wrong on several fronts, he
went to see Winkelman. Furstner announced that he would go to Britain
as soon as it was established that the fight should be given up. Winkelman
disagreed. His focus was inland. Talking now about what would happen
after a capitulation was not appropriate, neither for the army nor for the
navy. It did not go any further, however, than this exchange of thoughts.
Winkelman made no attempt to change Furstner’s mind.
What happened at Kornwerderzand, the eastern head of the IJsselmeer
Dam, that day was something that Winkelman had not seen so far in the
other theatres of operations. The troops stood firm. The news that a Ger-
man attack there had been unsuccessful was cold comfort for headquar-
ters, however, given that since 10 May the northern theatre of operations
had been the least important of all. Much more serious were the Field Ar-
my’s problems at the Grebbeberg. In the night of 12 May, the blocking off
of the German troops who had penetrated the position appeared to have
been successful. At the same time, the command post of the IVth Divi-
sion was preparing a counterattack which was to drive back the Germans
in the morning of 13 May. The reports that arrived at headquarters that
afternoon, however, told a different story. The counterattack had failed
and at Rhenen the Germans had reached the railway, the last defence. The
Dutch troops left their positions at the Grebbeberg in what was increas-
ingly beginning to resemble a rout. Eventually the line along the railway
fell as well.
Elsewhere in the Valley Position, events concluded more favourably. At
Scherpenzeel, in the IInd Division’s sector, the German attacked that day as
well, but this time to no avail. This was no consolation to the Commander
of the Field Army, however. The breach at Rhenen jeopardised the defence
of the entire line. Van Voorst tot Voorst therefore decided that the entire
Field Army was to retreat to the New Dutch Waterline.
Most ministers had concluded from Winkelman’s outline later that day
that not only the Queen, but also the cabinet should leave the country.7
Shortly after midday, the group left for the Hook of Holland where they
would be able to find a British warship. They phoned Winkelman from
the Hook of Holland. Besides announcing that the seat of government was
being moved abroad, they also had instructions for him regarding the war
policy to be followed. The instructions, drawn up by Minister Dijxhoorn,
repeated the earlier guideline: the commander-in-chief was to continue
fighting. Surrender was to be offered if further resistance proved pointless
and useless.
All in all, the country’s military position in the night of 13 May was
not to be envied. Only an incorrigible optimist could count on the ta-
bles being turned. Winkelman was no such optimist. Several decisions he
made on 12 and 13 May show that he expected an early capitulation to be
7 The Minister of Foreign Affairs, E.N. van Kleffens, and the Minister of Colonies,
Ch.J.I.M. Welter, had already left for London in the morning of 10 May 1940.
170 chapter five
the most likely end to the fighting, even though no such doubts could be
heard in his orders to the troops. Those orders focused on the determina-
tion to fight on. Winkelman’s plan to postpone the capitulation as long
as possible in the end focused on the question of what higher purpose
was served by continuing to fight. Closely connected was the question of
what sacrifices were proportional to that purpose. We can only guess at
Winkelman’s ideas in this respect. Most in line with the strategic thought
at headquarters before and during those days in May is the assumption
that the objective of the battle still lay in allied warfare. Even though the
defence of Fortress Holland was at an end, France, Britain and Belgium
were holding on. By fixing as many German troops as possible for as long
as possible, the Dutch armed forces would at least be able to prevent the
German army leadership from moving those units to the front in Belgium
or northern France. Closer to home there were common interests as well.
Giraud’s advance guards were still fighting in Noord-Brabant, while two
of his divisions were reinforcing the defence on the Zeeland islands and in
Zeeuws-Vlaanderen. The Dutch troops there had even been placed under
French supreme command.
The records do not show what sacrifices, military or otherwise, Win-
kelman did or did not consider acceptable for the continuation of opera-
tions. Nor is it known whether the issue was discussed in these terms at
headquarters in the days before 14 May. It is possible that the issue was
simply avoided so long as the actual situation did not give cause to make
statements on the matter. If this was the case, the decision on when to
capitulate not only depended on the resilience of the Dutch army and
population, but also on the decisiveness and the means with which the
Germans would continue their attack.
Düsseldorf, Tuesday 14 May 1940
For Generaloberst Fedor von Bock, 14 May 1940 was to be a busy day.
His command post was still in Düsseldorf, but the front line was moving
west, so to visit the forward troops he was having to travel increasingly
long distances. This day again, his attention was mainly on the 6th Army.
He visited the headquarters of the XVIth Corps in Tongeren and also ap-
peared there in the command post of the 4th Panzer Division.
Armeekommando 18 had by then moved to Uden. As the communi-
cations with Rijsoord remained flawed, however, the Head of the Opera-
tions Division went to the command post of the XXXIXth Corps to be in-
formed of the situation at Rotterdam. At 12.20 hrs he was back in Uden
and announced that, at 13.20 hrs that same afternoon, after initial artillery
shelling and an air strike, the XXXIXth Corps would continue the attack
in Rotterdam and then penetrate deep into Fortress Holland. Prior to the
attack, a parlementaire would be sent to the commander of Rotterdam to
claim the city. It would be clear by now to the Dutch commanders as well
that they were fighting a lost cause.
Von Küchler was at the Xth Corps that afternoon and concluded from
his own observations that the Dutch army was on the verge of collapse.
The faulty communications meant that von Küchler’s staff in Uden had
not been informed that afternoon of the actual situation in Rotterdam. At
16.20 hrs, when the staff was still counting on a continuation of the fight-
ing, the report came that Rotterdam had capitulated, soon to be followed
by the surrender of Utrecht. In a proclamation broadcast at 20.30 hrs on
Dutch radio, Winkelman announced that the Dutch armed forces, with
the exception of the troops in Zeeland, would lay down their weapons.
It was through this broadcast that Army Group B and Armeekommando
18 found out about the Dutch capitulation. When von Bock reported this
good news to von Brauchitsch, the latter responded rather coolly. Von
Bock’s annoyance was reflected in his journal entry: “I told Brauchitsch,
whose response to this not entirely unimportant event was ‘yes’.”8
Von Brauchitsch may have been preoccupied. The most significant
development on 14 May for the Oberkommando des Heeres was not the
Dutch capitulation, but the situation at Army Group A, in particular the
battle at the bridgehead on the left bank of the Meuse at Sedan, which was
to be followed by a breakout. The entire success of Fall Gelb could come to
depend on it.
Von Bock then ordered von Küchler to begin negotiations with Winkel-
man. As long as Hitler had not issued any further orders, the Dutch soldiers
were to be considered prisoners of war, which for the time being sufficiently
answered Generalmajor Marcks’ questions of the previous evening.
The Hague, Tuesday 14 May 1940
At General Headquarters, the fifth day of war began in relative calm. The
Germans appeared to be leaving Kornwerderzand in peace. The Field
Army reported an uninterrupted retreat to the New Dutch Waterline. The
troops were tired, but nonetheless they were in the process of taking up
their new positions. At the IVth Division and Brigade B, it was to be some
8 Ibidem, 14 May 1940.

After the capitulation: German columns enter Amsterdam …
... and arrive at the town hall.

time before the defence was properly organised, as much of the equip-
ment and weapons had been lost and some units had been completely dis-
persed. The question was whether the Field Army would have that much
time. The Light Division and the Kil Group also proved to have completed
the retreat they had begun the previous day. In Rotterdam, the situation
was still dangerous, but stable. Scharroo was making preparations to re-
group his troops where the Germans would try to breach the front along
the Maas. The threat behind him from the German bridgehead at Over-
schie was reduced that morning, as parts of the Ist Corps attacked it at
05.00 hrs from several directions.
The relative calm at headquarters gave Winkelman and Van Voorst
tot Voorst the opportunity to review the overall situation at the various
fronts. After careful consideration, they concluded that the situation was
as serious as ever, but still not hopeless yet. There was no reason to offer
surrender already. The meeting was held because it was necessary to in-
form the population of the departure of the Queen and the cabinet.
While Winkelman was having the proclamation written, he already
knew of another person who was about to leave. At 08.00 hrs that morn-
ing, he had been phoned by Vice Admiral Furstner who, with reference to
the meeting of the day before, enquired whether the prospects had since
improved. Furstner’s response to Winkelman’s answer that the prospects
were still bleak, was to announce his departure.
At around 10.30 hrs, Colonel Scharroo phoned. A few minutes earlier, a
German parlementaire had arrived at his headquarters with an ultimatum
demanding the surrender of the city. The document gave Scharroo two
hours to consider. After that time, measures would be taken that could re-
sult in the total destruction of the city. He could not tell from the signature
who the authority was who had sent the document. Scharroo, and Wilson
for that matter who had been with him since 12 May, did not attach any
great value to the document. After four days of fighting, the military situ-
ation was still entirely under control. Particularly in view of the vague sig-
nature, there was a chance that the ultimatum was a ruse. Winkelman con-
curred with Scharroo and Wilson. They could not afford to make mistakes,
especially not regarding such an important issue as Rotterdam. In order to
gain more certainty, Winkelman ordered Scharroo to ask for a new ulti-
matum that was signed so that it could be seen who was demanding their
surrender and in what capacity. By that time it was 12.15 hrs.
Two hours later, headquarters tried to phone Scharroo to obtain an up-
date, but to no avail. The line was dead. Winkelman and Van Voorst tot
Voorst were not left in suspense very long, however, because three quar-
174 chapter five
ters of an hour later, at 15.00 hrs, Wilson arrived at headquarters to report

that the centre of Rotterdam had been bombed and was burning. The air
strike had begun at around 13.30 hrs, just after the Dutch parlementaire
had received the second ultimatum. Wilson also reported that before his
departure he had authorised Scharroo, on behalf of the commander-in-
chief, to capitulate, unless Wilson were to arrive back by a certain time
with orders to the contrary. Winkelman approved Wilson’s decision.
What were the consequences of the imminent breach at Rotterdam?
Evidently, the German troops could advance further into Fortress Hol-
land. At Delft, however, they would be faced with the antitank front. The
road to The Hague was not simply wide open. For the Field Army, the
situation looked less favourable, as it could now also be attacked from the
rear. Prior to such an attack, however, the Germans would have to deploy
their troops in the difficult Dutch polder terrain. That would inevitably
take the necessary time. Winkelman’s first reaction, therefore, was to go
no further than surrendering Rotterdam. The battle had not yet been de-
cided, even though the prospects had become even bleaker.
There was more going on, however. At around the same time as Wilson
was delivering his report, General Headquarters was phoned by the staff
of the cantonment commander of Utrecht, Reserve Colonel C.E.W. baron
van Voorst tot Voorst, a brother of the Commander of the Field Army and
of the army Chief of Staff. In the early afternoon, a German parlementaire
had appeared near Utrecht, handed over a sealed envelope and announced
that an answer was expected within two hours. The German troops that
had passed the evacuated Valley Positions had obviously reached the New
Dutch Waterline. Assuming that it was an ultimatum for the surrender of
the city, Van Voorst tot Voorst had sent the envelope back unopened, as
General Headquarters had ordered in the previous day’s secret instruc-
tions that the city was to be defended to the last man. The contents of the
ultimatum, however, were not difficult to guess, as German aircraft had
dropped pamphlets over the city. The pamphlets said that if Utrecht were
defended, the city would be considered a fortress and would be attacked
with tanks and air strikes. Only unconditional surrender could spare the
inhabitants the same fate as Warsaw, it added.
Winkelman was now faced with two very similar messages. One was
that a defended city had been bombed from the air during the negotia-
tions for a possible capitulation, the other was that another city now lay in
the front line and was at risk of being attacked from the air. Winkelman
and his staff immediately assumed that there was a direct operational con-
nection between the German actions at Rotterdam and those at Utrecht.
Both messages obviously came from the same source. It could therefore
be assumed that if Utrecht were to be defended, the city would suffer the
same fate as Rotterdam. The alternative, the surrender of Utrecht, would
mean a second breach of Fortress Holland and would seal the fate of the
Field Army. In either case an overall capitulation of the Dutch armed forc-
es in the very near future was inevitable. Was this then the moment when
fighting on would be, as the cabinet put it, pointless and useless? Winkel-
man held consultations by telephone with Van Andel, who was respon-
sible for Rotterdam, and Van Voorst tot Voorst, the Commander of the
Field Army and subsequently with the key officers at headquarters. They
all felt that the capitulation was inevitable. Winkelman then cut the Gord-
ian knot: the Dutch armed forces were to lay down their weapons. The
battle was over.
Just before 17.00 hrs, the official telex with the message of the capit-
ulation went out to all subordinate commanders. The telex gave as the
reasons for the capitulation the bombing of Rotterdam, the imminent
destruction of Utrecht and the consequences of both for the civilian pop-
ulation. The command sought the cause of the collapse of the Dutch de-
fence in the “imbalance in the possession of material resources (…) some-
times coupled with betrayal”. The soldier’s honour had, however, “been
fulfilled entirely”.9
Even now that the battle was over, Winkelman continued to bear in
mind the interests of the allies. The final stipulation of the capitulation or-
der ordered the rendering useless or destruction of weapons, ammunition
and other materiel, adding that this applied in particular to the coastal ar-
tillery. After all, a new German front against Britain now existed along the
coast. In addition, the capitulation did not apply to Zeeland, because the
position of the French troops there was not to be compromised.
In the early evening, Winkelman informed the Dutch public about the
capitulation by means of a proclamation and a short radio speech. It was
now a case of waiting for the further arrangements regarding the surrender.
Rijsoord, Wednesday 15 May 1940
In the night of 14 May, the staff of the 18th Army sought contact with
General Winkelman, using Dutch radio frequencies. He was requested to be
1940 (The Hague, 1957) 112.
176 chapter five
The two key German figures

in the Dutch theatre of
operations, the commander
of the 18th Army, General der
Artillerie Georg von Küchler
(left), and the commander of
Army Group B, Generaloberst
Fedor von Bock (right). They
are pictured here meeting at
Rijsoord on the morning of 15
May, shortly after the signing of
the Dutch capitulation.
in Rotterdam at the northern abutment of the Maas bridge at 08.20 hrs

on 15 May. He would be picked up there for the capitulation negotiations.
As there was no answer, von Küchler sent one of his staff officers to Gen-
eral Headquarters, arriving in The Hague at 05.00 hrs. At the same time,
Armeeoberkommando 18 was trying to reach Winkelman by telephone via
Utrecht. This was also to no avail. Eventually, at 08.00 hrs word reached
Uden that Winkelman would be in Rotterdam at 08.20 hrs.
Von Küchler himself had already left his command post at 05.50 hrs
and had arrived at Rijsoord at 07.50 hrs. He had all protocol measures
taken that were necessary for the negotiations to take place in a digni-
fied manner. The local primary school was chosen as the location for the
discussions. Winkelman arrived in Rotterdam with a slight delay. There
was a German escort waiting for him to take him to the headquarters of
the XXXIXth Corps in Rijsoord. The negotiations went smoothly. Most
of the time was taken up with translating the agreement. The only dif-
ference of opinion concerned the German proposal to consider Dutch

airmen who continued to fight as franc tireurs. Winkelman rejected this
proposal and after some discussion both parties agreed to simply delete
this item from the agreement. Winkelman also had included in the agree-
ment, after some discussion, that the surrender did not apply to the Dutch
troops in Zeeland. The capitulation document was signed by both parties
at 10.15 hrs, with Winkelman returning to The Hague half an hour later.
Von Küchler then ordered the photographers of his Propagandakompanie
to photograph the Dutch defences on the northern bank of the Nieuwe
Maas, to prove that Rotterdam had been a defended city and that the
bombing had been justified. Von Bock now also arrived in Rijsoord. He
had wanted to attend the negotiations, but was too late, and came to thank
von Küchler and his army group for their efforts. Armeeoberkommando 18
moved to Tilburg that day, in order to lead the attack on Zeeland and For-
tress Antwerp from there. Von Bock returned to Düsseldorf via Utrecht
and the Grebbeberg. The next day, the Heeresgruppenkommando went to a
new command post in Aachen, to continue its operations.
CHAPTER SIX
‘FALL FESTUNG’: A SURPRISE ATTACK ON THE HAGUE
Introduction
During the night of 9 May, bombers, fighter planes and transport aircraft
took off from German air bases for the surprise attack on the airfields of
Ypenburg, Valkenburg and Ockenburg. The plan was as follows: first, the
airfields would be bombed and machine-gunned to disrupt the defenc-
es, then paratroops would be dropped and, finally, the aircraft carrying
the air-transportable troops would land on the terrain which had by then
been captured by the paratroops. The barracks in The Hague were also to
be bombed to prevent the units billeted there from moving to the airfields.
The attack on The Hague was entrusted to the 22nd Air Transportable
Division, which was under the command of Generalleutnant H.E.O. Graf
von Sponeck. The division consisted of some 10,000 men, of whom, ac-
cording to the plan, 4,902 would land at Ypenburg, 3,313 at Valkenburg
and 1,049 at Ockenburg. Six companies of Fallschirmjäger had been as-
signed to the division from the 7th Air Division, while the 22nd Air Trans-
portable Division had had to lose several units to the 7th Air Division.
Once the airfields were in safe hands on the first day of battle and
enough troops had been flown in, the Germans would break out and ad-
vance on The Hague from three sides. Queen Wilhelmina, the cabinet and
the top military leaders would then fall into German hands. The airborne
troops were expected to operate aggressively and quickly occupy the main
junctions on the access roads to the airfields. The possibility of attacks by
the British air force in the afternoon of the first day of battle was taken into
account, so orders were given to entrench and set up air defences. Because
speed of action was paramount, the division commander had also decided
that his men should try to seize civilian motor vehicles in The Hague. Lists
of garages in The Hague were distributed for this purpose. Throughout the
fighting, therefore, German soldiers made constant attempts—some of
which were successful—to seize vehicles. While it could be said that the
whole operation was spectacular, it was also something of a gamble. The
22. Luftlande-
division
May 1940
XX
22
2 22
47
65
22 (-)
3 22
1 2
6 2-2
An anti-aircraft machine gun

of the Hussars-Motorcyclist
(left); the defence of Ypenburg
airfield was supported by
Landsverk M-36 armoured
vehicles (below).
‘fall festung’ 181
German army leadership assumed, as we have already seen, that once the
troops had reached Breda on the third day of battle, there would have been
a decisive result and the subsequent Dutch capitulation would only be a
matter of time. Perhaps, however, one single day might suffice for the cap-
ture of the Netherlands. This would be a possibility if the Netherlands, like
Denmark a month earlier, decided not to mount a staunch defence and,
shocked by the presence of the enemy in the seat of government, chose to
lay down its arms after some token resistance. If the landed units failed
to accomplish their mission and the Netherlands decided to fight to the
last, then the 22nd Air Transportable Division’s operation would be point-
less and the division would be able to do little more than hold its defensive
positions and wait to be relieved. The whole operation therefore had more
political than military significance, in the sense that capitulation under
those circumstances would be a political decision for which there was no
urgent military need. It should also be seen separately from the simultane-
ous airborne operations against the bridges at Rotterdam, Dordrecht and
Moerdijk, which were conducted by the 7th Air Division and which were
directly linked to the ground operations by the 18th Army.
Two days had been set aside for transferring and deploying the Air
Transportable Division. The plan was that after the transport aircraft had
set down their groups they would keep going back to Germany to pick up
new groups. Valkenburg would be taken by the 6th Parachute Company,
which belonged to the second battalion of the 2nd Parachute Regiment.
The 47th Infantry Regiment would then be flown in on transport aircraft
with supporting artillery, anti-aircraft artillery, engineer and reconnais-
sance units. Destined for Ypenburg were the first battalion of the 2nd Para-
chute Regiment, the first and third battalions of the 65th Infantry Regi-
ment and their support units. And lastly, reserved for Ockenburg were the
third company of the 2nd Parachute Regiment and three infantry compa-
nies from the 65th Infantry Regiment, under the staff of the second bat-
talion, supplied with some artillery, reconnaissance and logistic capacity.
Since the attack on Norway and Denmark, General Winkelman had
regarded an attack on the seat of government as a serious possibility.
Various measures had been taken in this respect, as a result of which the
Commander of Fortress Holland, Lieutenant General J. van Andel, had
various units at his disposal around The Hague on the night of 9 May. In
Wassenaar, there was the 1st Hussars-Motorcyclist Regiment (1 RHM).
Ypenburg airfield was protected by the third battalion of the Grena-
diers Regiment and six modern armoured vehicles. Around the airfield
at Valkenburg were two companies and a section of heavy machine guns
182 chapter six
from the third battalion of the 4th Infantry Regiment (4 RI). The subsidi-
ary airfield of Ockenburg was defended by a detachment of depot troops
consisting of 96 men and four light machine guns. These units, the anti-
aircraft defence and the aircraft stationed at the airfields were under the
command of the air defence commander, Lieutenant General Best, who
reported directly to General Winkelman. All these units were alerted
when the German attack began.
Also in Fortress Holland were all the depot troops and the Ist Corps,
which was available to the commander-in-chief as a strategic reserve. It
was envisaged that after war had broken out, the depot troops and the 1st
Corps would be placed under the Commander of Fortress Holland.
Ypenburg, Valkenburg and Ockenburg captured by the Germans
Because of the worrying reports from the borders, General Winkelman

had ordered all troops for the strategic defence to be put on the highest
level of alert with effect from 03.00 hrs on 10 May. At the Air Defence
Command, the tension was increased further by reports that foreign
planes were flying over Dutch territory. Preparations were made at Ypen-
burg; engines were warmed up so that twenty aircraft were combat-ready.
The commander of the Grenadiers battalion had positioned a company
round the landing strip. The heavy and light machine guns had the task of
covering this site with their fire and destroying any enemy elements that
landed there. That was also the task for the six armoured vehicles posi-
tioned at the north-western border of the landing area.
Another company was charged with the external defence of the airfield.
The fear was that paratroops landing outside the airfield and ‘malicious el-
ements’ coming from Delft or The Hague would attack Ypenburg from the
outside. This company was set up mainly along the Vliet between Rijswijk
and Delft. A third company served as a mobile reserve.
Around the airfield itself were four anti-aircraft machine-gun platoons
and two anti-aircraft artillery batteries. Shortly before 04.00 hrs, the air-
field was bombed; while the attack caused little material damage, it had a
severely demoralising effect on those defending the airfield. Despite the
chaos, nineteen planes succeeded in taking off and engaging in combat.
The first German assault wave consisted of the aforementioned first
battalion of the 2nd Parachute Regiment, with a strength of over five hun-
dred paratroops under the command of Hauptmann Noster. However,
the pilots of the transport aircraft had orientation problems, as a result
of which the paratroops landed too far from their target and were too
widely dispersed. Consequently, they were unable to perform their first

task, which was to occupy the airfield by means of a surprise attack. The
task remained clear for the paratroops: once they had oriented and reor-
ganised themselves, they were to reach the airfield as quickly as possible
and ideally via the shortest route. The Dutch defence troops, on the other
184 chapter six
hand, had more difficulty getting a grip on the situation. Suddenly they
found themselves in a state of war with the impression that the enemy was
everywhere. In the first chaotic phase of the fighting, therefore, there was
not much order in the Dutch operation. The confusion was not confined
to the company guarding the airfield itself. The battalion reserve also dis-
integrated rapidly.
Sporadic fighting then developed between the paratroops and the gren-
adiers who were located between Rijswijk and Delft. Affected by the bomb-
ing and the parachute landings, these grenadiers were easily swept along by
small groups of soldiers fleeing from Ypenburg. The Hoornbrug, the bridge
that provided access to The Hague, had a very strong appeal for them.
Because the paratroops who had landed shortly before 05.00 hrs lost
time in the regrouping and, because of the dispersed landings, were not
at full strength, it was around 07.00 hrs before they managed to reach the
main entrance to Ypenburg, together with soldiers from the transport air-
craft that had landed outside the airfield. They then took control of the
buildings at the airfield itself. At approximately 07.15 hrs, the commander
of the third Grenadiers battalion had no option but to surrender. Never-
theless, this did not give the attackers, some eight hundred men in all, free
use of the airfield. So what had happened in the meantime?
At 05.24 hrs, the first group of eight Junkers Ju-52 landed at Ypenburg
to set down the infantrymen of the 65th Infantry Regiment according to
plan. Instead of being met by the paratroops who had landed earlier, they
were met by a barrage of Dutch machine-gun fire. This was delivered by
Reserve Lieutenant F.H. Warnaars, the courageous and skilful commander
of a small group of grenadiers who had managed to hold their position at
the edge of the airfield. The armoured vehicles also delivered targeted fire.
The fact that the gunners in these vehicles defended themselves so well
is remarkable if one considers that they had had very little training with
live ammunition. Corporal J.P.L. Cools, for example, had until then only
fired two practice shots from his gun. The next group of seventeen air-
craft also stood little chance. Battered by the Dutch anti-aircraft artillery
and hampered by the burning planes on the ground, they also came under
the fire of the defending forces. Within an hour, it was no longer possi-
ble to land at the airfield. New waves of transport aircraft circled around
The Hague looking for somewhere to land. Planes landed here and there.
The division commander, von Sponeck, for example, who was supposed
to land at Ypenburg, set down near Ockenburg. In spite of all the confu-
sion, some Dutch soldiers showed immense personal courage. Conscript
Private J.C.A. Clasener, for example, captured two German aircrews in the
early morning of 10 May.
The attack on Valkenburg air base began just like the one on Ypenburg with
a bombardment at around 04.00 hrs that also sent many defenders running
for cover. At around 04.30 hrs, the first group of paratroops were dropped
to the southwest of the airfield, followed shortly afterwards by a second
group on the north-eastern side. While some advanced to the airfield it-
self, other groups pushed ahead to the village of Valkenburg and to Katwijk
aan den Rijn, Katwijk aan Zee, Wassenaar and the Haagsche Schouw cross-
roads. This company’s task–to occupy the airfield and seal off the access
roads–was completed successfully. Entirely according to plan, more than
fifty transport aircraft carrying personnel from the 47th Infantry Regiment
landed from 05.20 hrs, thus increasing the strength to over 850 men. The
air-transportable troops that had been flown in were able to disembark
without any major difficulty and take up their combat formations. By 06.00
hrs, the airfield was in the hands of the Germans, although it was to prove
a lesser advantage than they had envisaged. This was because Valkenburg
air base was still under construction and the grass strip was too weak to
bear the weight of an aircraft. Soon the landed planes had sunk so far into
the ground that they could no longer take off. This meant that the air base
had become blocked and completely unusable.
In contrast to events at Ypenburg and Valkenburg, the attack on Ock-
enburg did not start with a preparatory bombardment, although there
was a parachute drop there too. As mentioned previously, this involved
the 3rd Parachute Company with a strength of 162 men. The attack failed,
because only 36 of them landed near the airfield at 04.55 hrs. Navigational
errors meant that the others were widely dispersed when they landed.
From 05.24 hrs, a wave of seventeen enemy transport aircraft landed,
followed less than half an hour later by a second wave of six planes. Some
three hundred Germans thus arrived at the air base in a short space of
time. Von Sponeck himself landed shortly after 07.00 hrs, also outside
the airfield itself. In the course of the morning, the German strength at
and around the airfield increased to around six hundred men; added to
that number were another hundred or so crew members of aircraft which
could no longer take off.
The security company at Ockenburg was suddenly confronted with
the harsh reality of the war. At 04.00 hrs, the soldiers had been able to
observe the attack on Ypenburg. They had seen how four Dutch aircraft
had suddenly landed for more ammunition and fuel (which was not avail-
The commander of the 22nd Air Transportable Division, Generalleutnant
H.E.O. Graf von Sponeck (left) on 10 May 1940 at the edge of the woods near Ockenburg
airfield. The swastika flag was to mark the position for German planes.
Fortress Holland from 10 May 1940
Commander of
Fortress Holland
XXX XX
*) Northern
1 (-) 1 MR Front
XX
1
Southern
1 Front
2
Gr 2 2 MR Western
J Front
4
XX (-)
Security
3 Troops Depot
Company
15x
1 6 Air Defence
9 Command
12
1 10
3 *) 1st Hussars-Motorcyclist Regiment was removed from the Light Division

on 23 April 1940 and placed under command of the Commander of
Fortress Holland.
1
able). When they saw the parachute drop, a patrol of a sergeant and seven
men turned out. The offensive actions of the airborne troops (from 05.20
hrs) drove the demoralised company from the airfield and scattered them.
Only one section held its ground on the terrain. This one surrendered at
around 07.00 hrs after being attacked from the rear and losing men. The
airfield was thus in German hands. Losses were high on the Dutch side.
Of the 96 men in the security company, 24 had died and 18 were wound-
ed, while others had been captured by the Germans. But here too, there
was no real victory for the Germans. Aircraft blocked the terrain, making
further landings impossible, and the division commander, von Sponeck,
had no control of events. He was actually supposed to have landed at
Ypenburg and he also had no radio contact with either his units or Gene-
ralleutnant Kurt Student, who was in command of the overall airborne
operation. Soon his greatest concern was how to escape the imminent
encirclement, since it had by then become clear that strong Dutch forces
were closing a ring of steel around Ockenburg.
The continuing battle for the airfields on 10 May
In a short space of time, the area around The Hague had become a chaotic
battlefield. German airborne troops were trying to carry out their tasks,
which included sealing off access roads in Loosduinen and near the Haag-
sche Schouw and Katwijk. Other troops who had not landed at the pre-
dicted sites were doing their utmost to join the main force.
On the Dutch side, junior commanders acted on their own initiative in
attacking the landed troops. In the meantime, the senior commanders, such
as the Commander of Fortress Holland, Lieutenant General Van Andel, and
the commander of the 1st Corps, Major General N.T. Carstens, tried to es-
tablish some order in the counterattacks. The high-level command process
did not, however, run smoothly, as there was no information regarding the
strength of the German troops. Important information was obtained from
documents that were found in a German plane which was shot down near
the Adelheidstraat in The Hague. Other information, such as march orders,
was seized in the morning of 12 May from a partially burnt-out aircraft at
Ockenburg. Van Andel was not therefore in full possession of the facts un-
til 13 May. The Commander of Fortress Holland found himself faced with
three problems: he had to defend the seat of government against the ad-
vancing enemy, recapture the airfields and destroy the landed units. He also
had to be mindful of the possibility of new landings.
188 chapter six
In complete accordance with the plans, General Winkelman placed the

1st Corps and the depot troops under the command of the Fortress Hol-
land commander on 10 May. In order to be able to provide air support
for the forthcoming recapture of the airfields, the air forces were also as-
signed to Van Andel. He gave orders to the commander of the 1st Corps,
which comprised two divisions, to recapture the airfields.
Major General Carstens then gave orders to the effect that the Ist Di-
vision, under the command of Colonel W.F.K. Bischoff van Heemskerck,
should attack Ypenburg airfield, that the IIIrd Division, commanded by
Colonel L.H. Kraak, should attack Valkenburg airfield and that the Grena-
diers Regiment, commanded by Major J.K. de Visser, should attack Ock-
enburg airfield. Van Andel thus gradually began to gain control of the
situation surrounding The Hague.
The recapture of Ypenburg
The German troops at Ypenburg had been in a perilous position since

around 07.00 hrs. The airfield was only partially under their control and it
had also become clear to them that the proposed offensive towards the seat
of government was impossible. It had now become a matter of self-pres-
ervation. The fact that the Germans had abandoned any attempt to force
their way into The Hague was something of which General Headquarters
was, of course, unaware. Van Andel believed there were two dangers to
fear: a breakthrough to The Hague through Rijswijk (the Hoornbrug) and
Leidschendam and another to Delft. The weakened second battalion of
grenadiers was quickly transferred from The Hague to Rijswijk. The same
action was taken with an artillery battalion. Depot troops followed and
other points along the Vliet were occupied as well.
At around 10.00 hrs, an infantry company at Ypenburg, which thought
it was dealing with a German unit of approximately 70 men, launched a
counterattack. This was foiled by German fire. Only when Bischoff van
Heemskerck had arrived and the artillery brought in from Naaldwijk had
completed its fire adjustment did the fortunes of war begin to change in
the early afternoon.
At the Oude Tolbrug, a bridge over the Vliet just to the north-east of
Drievliet, there was by then a fierce battle raging. German soldiers who
had occupied Villa Dorrepaal kept the bridge under fire, but made no at-
tempt to cross the bridge. Reserve Second Lieutenant G.J.L. Maduro had
arrived with a small detachment in Voorburg at approximately 10.00 hrs.
It would be impossible to force a way across the Oude Tolbrug until at
After they had landed and secured the airfields around The Hague, the airborne troops
were to force their way into the city to capture cabinet officials and the head of state.
For this, they were provided with basic maps of the city. These documents fell into Dutch
hands when they were found in a crashed Junkers Ju-52. This fragment shows the route
from Ockenburg airfield to Noordeinde Palace.
Seized German outline map of the 22nd Air Transportable Division showing, amongst
other things, the Jacob Mosselstraat, where the Air Defence Command was based at No. 2.
190 chapter six
least 14.00 hrs. At that time, an anti-aircraft gun opened fire on Villa Dor-
repaal and Maduro and his men stormed across the bridge and forced
their way into the villa. Eleven paratroops were taken prisoner.
Once this breach of the German defences had been made, troops were
able to advance further, and the attack at the Hoornbrug gradually gained
momentum. At 15.30 hrs, Ypenburg was once again under Dutch con-
trol. The Germans put up some resistance for another few hours at several
farms, but by around 19.30 hrs that race was run too. From the Hoorn-
brug, the attackers were now able to link up with the troops in Delft. Ger-
man airborne troops who had managed to get away unscathed withdrew
towards Overschie, where they set up defences with other Germans. All in
all, Ypenburg and the surrounding area was once again under the control
of the Commander of Fortress Holland by nightfall.
The battle for Valkenburg
The first counterattack at Valkenburg was launched by the command-

er of the third battalion of the 4th Infantry Regiment (III-4 RI), Major J.
Mallinckrodt. Two companies from his battalion had been dispersed
during the battle at the airfield itself, but the major took his remaining
troops from Katwijk to the airfield. When he was within 200 metres of the
airfield, the attack was halted by enemy fire. The Dutch withdrew to the
dunes and took up positions there.
By then, the Commander of Fortress Holland had at 05.00 hrs given
orders to the 1st Hussars-Motorcyclist Regiment stationed in Wassenaar
to disable paratroops who had landed between Wassenaar and Valken-
burg. This order had two consequences. On the one hand, there were now
troops between The Hague and the Germans who had landed at Valken-
burg and, on the other, Van Andel lost an important part of his reserves.
He would thus, after a while, instruct other troops to relieve that regiment.
When it became apparent that Valkenburg air base had fallen into enemy
hands, the commander of 4 RI, Lieutenant Colonel H.D. Buurman, or-
dered his first and second battalions to advance to the airfield. I-4 RI was
able to move unhindered from Katwijk aan Zee to the dune area to the
north of the airfield. The second battalion, which was in Noordwijk and
which was under the command of Reserve Major J.J.N. Cramer, marched
to Katwijk aan den Rijn, where it encountered Germans who had man-
aged to push through to there. The advance halted, because Germans
who had lodged themselves in houses belonging to the Seminary of the
Franciscan Friars (St Willibrord Institution) kept the only bridge over the
Oude Rijn under constant fire. At approximately 15.00 hrs, Major Cramer
managed, through his bold and skilful actions, to oust the Germans and
clear the way. While all this was going on, the third battalion of the 2nd
Artillery Regiment had sprung into action. At 07.00 hrs, the batteries had
been set up in such a way that they could deliver fire on the airfield.
When the battalion commander, Major H.J.J.W. Dürst Britt, was denied
permission to open fire and made enquiries, the following turned out to
be the case. A certain Oberleutnant Hohendorff had made a Dutch en-
sign who had been taken prisoner telephone to say that there were Dutch
prisoners of war in the hangars. “Things will turn out badly for them”,
Hohendorff had said, referring to what would happen if the airfield came
under fire. The report was disregarded by the Dutch, without any thought
for the awkward position of the German officer, who was burdened with
around 160 prisoners of war. What is more, in Army Announcement no. 3
issued by General Headquarters, the event was referred to as a violation of
the law of war. Literally, it read: “A new cowardly outrage was committed
by German troops, when the German commanding officer Hohendorff
threatened to kill the captured Dutch airfield troops if that airfield came
under artillery fire.”1
At approximately 08.30 hrs, the artillery commenced its fire regis-
tration and the airfield came under fire during the course of the morn-
ing. The five hundred or so remaining airborne troops subsequently en-
trenched in the village of Valkenburg, which was to have a hard time of it
over the next few days. The airfield itself thus returned to Dutch control
by the end of the afternoon.
During the morning of 10 May, a battle was also fought at the Haag-
sche Schouw, the site where the main highway from Amsterdam to The
Hague crosses the Oude Rijn. Immediately after landing, paratroops had
occupied the bridge and the surrounding area. This meant that the Ist Di-
vision’s ammunition supplies were at risk. Various depot troops moved in
to break the German resistance and clear the way. With vigour and excep-
tional courage, Reserve Major H. Mulder and several soldiers managed
to recapture the bridge. The passage was thus free once again. There were
further skirmishes between Dutch and German troops at several other lo-
cations, including one at Maaldrift along the same highway.
1940 (The Hague, 1957) 282. See also the illustration on page 10. The real name of the Ger-
man officer was Oberleutnant Hohendorn, Zugführer in the 11. Kompanie of the 47. Infan-
terieregiment. Informal statement by E.H. Brongers.
192 chapter six
In the days that followed, various attempts were made to put the Ger-
mans out of action in the village of Valkenburg, but to no avail. Although
the Dutch troops had artillery and were superior in number, they were
less proficient than their opponents. In firing, the Germans had the ad-
vantage of the terrain, which was completely flat and was intersected by
canals and ditches. On 11 May, attempts were made first by II and III-4 RI
and subsequently by I-9 RI to capture the village. Guns from III-2 RA and
II-6 RA supported these attacks. The civilian population found themselves
in serious danger during these battles. Artillery fire hit the church and the
town hall, where some civilians had sought refuge and where there were
also wounded personnel and Dutch prisoners of war. During the first at-
tack, the German commander in Valkenburg told the mayor to ask Lieu-
tenant Colonel Buurman to shift his fire. He in turn promised to put the
request to his seniors, but that had no effect before the end of his regi-
ment’s battle and the artillery support continued during the attack by I-9
RI. On 12 May, I-9 RI repeated its attack, with the support of II-9 RI and
III-2 RA. Fires were breaking out in the village by this time. In the early
morning of 14 May, a delegation of residents requested the evacuation of
the civilian population and of the Dutch and German wounded. The com-
mander of the 1st Corps, Major General Carstens, gave permission for the
evacuation of civilians, which took place later that morning. He would
not, however, allow any negotiations for a ceasefire in order to evacuate
the wounded service personnel. Instead, he demanded the surrender of
the Germans in Valkenburg. They refused. In order to thwart any possible
German breakout, Buurman ordered 2-II-6 RA to deliver fire on the vil-
lage that afternoon.2
An important factor was the presence of German troops in the dune
area near the Wassenaarse Slag. There were about 350 men, who had come
from aircraft that had landed outside Valkenburg airfield, some of them
on the beach. The mopping-up operation in this dune area was a fiasco.
In the night of 10 May, one Dutch battalion was completely dispersed and
severe losses later inflicted on another. This group of Germans managed
to hold their own until the capitulation on 14 May.
2 M. Witkamp, “4 R.I. Regimentsarts. Verslag Hp.V.”, undated, in: Documentatie Ne-

derlands Instituut voor Militaire Historie Den Haag (DC-NIMH), Strijd Nederlands Grond-
gebied, box 476, file 2; A.C. de Wilde, “Gebeurtenissen te Valkenburg (Z.-H.) in de dagen
10 tot 15 mei van het jaar onzes Heeren 1940”, undated, in: DC-NIMH, Strijd Nederlands
Grondgebied, box 476, file 1; N.T. Carstens, “Verslag van het Ie Legerkorps van 10 t/m 14 mei
1940”, 20 December 1941, in: DC-NIMH, Strijd Nederlands Grondgebied, box 473, file 1.
Ockenburg back in Dutch hands
At Ockenburg too, junior commanders took action on their own initiative

immediately after the landings. Counterattacks thus came from Loosdui-
nen, where the staff of the Grenadiers Regiment and a machine-gun com-
pany, a mortar company, an antitank artillery company and a battery of
6-Veld field guns were based. Led by officers, small groups advanced and
reached the vicinity of the airfield. In the meantime, German airborne
troops, albeit in very small numbers, began to move to Loosduinen in or-
der to occupy vital intersections in accordance with their mission. They
drove the Dutch back to Loosduinen, where fierce fighting was soon tak-
ing place. The commander of the Grenadiers Regiment, whose command
post was based in Loosduinen, was forced to move it to The Hague. While
he was doing so, reinforcements arrived, which meant that the Dutch re-
mained in control of the situation in Loosduinen. In a sense, the danger
had not been so grave, as the Germans in Loosduinen were too weak to
advance to The Hague with any degree of success. Their primary mission
was to block the access roads to Ockenburg and wait until the main force
was in a position to begin the attack on The Hague.
Events in Loosduinen were also repeated in the nearby Meer en Bosch
area. After the reports of the parachute landings, the first battalion of
grenadiers, located in the west of The Hague, prepared for battle. One
of the companies advanced quickly along the Laan van Meerdervoort,
moved past the woods of Meer en Bosch and also got a point patrol to
within a very short distance of the airfield. This company too had to deal
with Germans who were trying to occupy the intersections. The combat
report of Reserve Captain H.A. Gunters, written on 11 May 1940, stated:
Marched with safety measures in open formation along the Buizerdlaan–
Sportlaan–Savornin Lohmanlaan–Aronskelkweg–Muurbloemweg–Laan van
Meerdervoort. Ground was won through Meer en Bosch and the allotments
to the south. Some of the unit, about 1½ sections, subsequently crossed the
Kijkduinschestraat, but were hampered by fire to such an extent that forward
movement became impossible. It was here that the company suffered its loss-
es. When the same part that had been in the allotments then also came under
fire from mortars and artillery, troops withdrew to the southern boundary of
Meer en Bosch.3
This action was typical of many others in the battle around The Hague,
particularly in terms of duration. By means of the route referred to above,
3 H.A. Gunters, “Gevechtsbericht van het gevecht op den 10den mei 1940”, 11 May
1940, in: DC-NIMH, Strijd Nederlands Grondgebied, box 475, file 7.
The commander of the 22nd Air Transportable Division, Generalleutnant H.E.O. Graf von
Sponeck helped personally to dig the field fortifications in the woods at Ockenburg on 10 May.
Seized city map of The Hague, showing the residence of Prime Minister jonkheer
D.J. de Geer at Prins Mauritslaan 61, and of the Army Chief of Staff of General Headquarters,
Major General H.F.M. baron van Voorst tot Voorst, Jan van Nassaustraat 60.
the distance of 2.5 km could be covered in 25 minutes in march tempo.

Gunters left at approximately 05.45 hrs. He reached the western edge of
Meer en Bosch at 06.30 hrs. After halting his progress for a while, prob-
ably to restore cohesion in his company, he advanced further. At the inter-
section with the Kijkduinsestraat, the grenadiers came under fire during
which some men were wounded or killed. Between 08.00 and 09.00 hrs,
Gunters ordered his men to pull back to the edge of Meer en Bosch. The
entire operation had lasted approximately three hours. The outcome was
thus that the grenadiers fell back to the edge of Meer en Bosch and took
up positions there.
After all these poorly coordinated actions, born out of necessity, the
command situation started to become more organised. The grenadiers, re-
inforced by depot troops, were to attack Ockenburg from the west of The
Hague, while a rifle battalion was to advance to Ockenburg from Monster.
The attack was to be supported by the first battalion of the 2nd Artillery
Regiment that was stationed at Poeldijk.
Between 07.00 and 08.00 hrs, the Germans were given a foretaste of
the Dutch resolve to recapture Ockenburg. Four Dutch planes bombed
the airfield. One of the aircraft, a Fokker T-V, was under the command of
Reserve Second Lieutenant Observer B. Swagerman. After accomplishing
the mission, his plane was shot down by enemy fighter planes just off the
coast. Swagerman was the only surviving member of the five-man crew.
He came down in the water five hundred metres from the coastline, man-
aged to get out of his heavy flying gear and swam ashore. He then took
part in various other sorties and died on 13 May after an attack on the
Moerdijk bridge.
Positioned at Poeldijk was the first battalion of the 2nd Artillery Regi-
ment (I‑2 RA). When the battalion commander, Major M.G. van Kes-
teren, received orders to support the attack by the grenadiers, he sent
Lieutenant M.P. Feith to the water tower in Monster as an observer. From
there, Feith, who was in radio contact with the battalion, could oversee
part of the airfield. At around 08.00 hrs, the battalion fired the first shots.
Round after round was fired throughout the morning. The landed planes
burst into flames and new landings were hampered. Von Sponeck real-
ised that his lightly armed infantrymen did not stand a chance against the
artillery. With a group of around three hundred men, he retreated to the
woods at Ockenburg, where he set up his defences.
The artillery threat almost became even more serious for von Sponeck.
What had happened was, after the observation post had been set up in the
water tower, a patrol consisting of a corporal and three privates set off for
196 chapter six
Loosduinen with an ultra-shortwave radio to establish communications

between the commander of the Grenadiers Regiment and the artillery
battalion at Poeldijk. On the way from Poeldijk to Loosduinen, however, a
number of Germans had holed up at Dekkershoekje. They opened fire on
the car that was carrying the patrol. One of those inside was killed and the
others were taken prisoner.
This event meant that it had now become impossible to direct the artil-
lery fire to the targets from Loosduinen as well. Shortly after 11.00 hrs,
the grenadiers left their starting position in Meer en Bosch, advanced and
engaged with the various pockets of German resistance. While some Ger-
mans wanted to carry on fighting, others were waving white flags, which
brought about the following situation:
At one point we saw Germans waving white flags. Halfway through the en-
trance [to the airfield], we came under fire from the direction in which these
Germans had disappeared. One of our men, G. Damstede, was wounded.
Because of what the Germans had done, we were so angry that we gave the
Germans what for. We killed some Germans, others surrendered.4
Between 14.00 and 15.00 hrs, the airfield once again returned to Dutch
control. Because of the contribution by the Dutch artillery, the losses had
remained relatively low.5 When they were mopping up the last pockets of
resistance, the grenadiers proceeded with caution. They took two hours to
cover a distance of less than one kilometre.
Further actions against the airborne troops and the battle at Overschie
On the evening of 10 May, the commander of the 1st Corps issued a defen-
sive order to the effect that The Hague was to be secured. In it, he defined
a line which formed a wide arc around the city: from Ockenburg, through
Delft, Zoetermeer and Leiden to Noordwijk. His corps was to mount a
staunch defence on this line. He also instructed the units at the airfields
and near the other concentrations of paratroops to maintain their posi-
tions. On the morning of 11 May, Carstens partially retracted this order
and, on the instructions of the Commander of Fortress Holland, issued
a number of offensive orders. These were designed to eliminate the vari-
ous groups of German airborne troops and regain full control of the main
4 Statement made by conscript grenadier A. Brouwer, 21 March 1949 in: DC-NIMH,
Strijd Nederlands Grondgebied, box 475, file 5.
5 C.D. Kamerling, Algemeen overzicht van de strijd om en in de Vesting Holland (zonder
het oostfront) en de strijd tegen de luchtlandingstroepen rondom ’s‑Gravenhage mei 1940 (The
Hague, 1954) 79.
The 22nd Air Transportable Division had wanted to distribute this pamphlet among the
civilian population in The Hague once the city had been occupied.
Ockenburg airfield in the afternoon of 10 May, with Junkers Ju-52 transport aircraft
and two Dutch Fokker D-XXI fighter planes.
198 chapter six
highway from Rotterdam to The Hague and of the roads in the Westland
area. If that succeeded, the threat within Fortress Holland would have
been removed, just as General Headquarters wished.
On the evening of 10 May, von Sponeck received radio contact from
General der Flieger A. Kesselring, the commander of Air Fleet 2. Von
Sponeck was told that the attack on The Hague would not be continued
any longer. He was to go to Overschie and assemble as much as possible
of what remained of his division. It was clear to von Sponeck that some
of the wounded would have to stay behind in this exfiltration operation.
There were still dead and wounded personnel on the ground at the air-
field, Dutch as well as German, who, because of the shortage of medical
personnel and because of the dangerous situation, could not be evacuated
or recovered by either side. On the morning of 11 May, 2-I Grenadiers
Regiment was visited by a German officer, who said he was coming to
parley. He requested a ceasefire so that the Dutch and German wound-
ed could be taken care of. Blindfolded, he was taken to Major General
Carstens, whose response was clear: “First the unconditional surrender of
all the units that are still in the woods, then the wounded will be tended
to immediately.” But the paratroops refused to surrender in the afternoon
of 11 May, a response which the grenadiers “answered with extremely vig-
orous fire by all light infantry weapons and heavy machine guns on the
edge of the woods at Ockenburg.”6 Similar events occurred at Valkenburg.
There, too, the uncompromising demand had been set: unconditional sur-
render. The demands of battle outweighed humanitarian considerations.
On 11 May, not much was happening around The Hague apart from a
few skirmishes. At Ockenburg, however, von Sponeck was preparing his
exfiltration, entirely in accordance with his new orders. At approximately
23.00 hrs on 11 May, he was ready. Without making a sound, the general
and over three hundred men displaced from Ockenburg to Wateringen;
Dutch guard posts and patrols noticed nothing. During the night of 11
May, the German group arrived in Wateringen, where a Dutch guard post
raised the alarm. Naturally, the commander of the Hague Group who was
6 W. Antheunissen, “De gevechten en verrichtingen van het I Bataljon Grenadiers in de

oorlogsdagen van 10 t.m. 14 Mei 1940”, undated, in: DC-NIMH, Strijd Nederlands Grond-
gebied, box 475, file 1; N.T. Carstens, “Verslag van het Ie Legerkorps van 10 t/m 14 mei 1940”,
20 December 1941, in: DC-NIMH, Strijd Nederlands Grondgebied, box 473, file 1; J. Mut-
ters, “Gevechtsbericht van het gevecht op den 11en Mei 1940”, 6 June 1940 in: DC-NIMH,
Strijd Nederlands Grondgebied, box 475, file 5; Statement by A. Lefeber, 28 March 1949, in:
DC-NIMH, Strijd Nederlands Grondgebied, box 474, map 11; W. Antheunissen, “Gevechts-
bericht van het gevecht op den 10en Mei 1940”, 18 May 1940, in: DC-NIMH, Strijd Neder-
lands Grondgebied, box 475, file 1; Battle report by H.P. Wenckenbach, undated (probably
autumn 1941), in: DC-NIMH, Strijd Nederlands Grondgebied, box 474, file 21.
stationed there, Reserve Lieutenant Colonel T. Beets, thought that it was

an attack on his headquarters. He fought tooth and nail to defend Wate-
ringen. The Germans, however, had absolutely no intention of occupying
the village and, after going a short distance in a few captured buses, they
left Wateringen behind them. They reached Overschie via ’t Woud and
Schipluiden.
On 13 May, Dutch troops, who had had a hard time of it in the mop-
ping-up operation between Ypenburg and Overschie, received orders to at-
tack Overschie. This plan was thwarted, however, by an order from General
Winkelman to form an antitank front that ran along the Loosduinen–Wa-
teringen–Delft–Pijnacker–Zoetermeer–Leiderdorp–Katwijk aan Zee line.
This was because the commander-in-chief was extremely worried about
the German troop movements on the Moerdijk–Dordrecht–Rotterdam
axis and feared a further breach. The attack on Overschie was cancelled.
However, Colonel P.W. Scharroo, the Rotterdam cantonment com-
mander, had no wish to leave the Germans undisturbed. He ordered the
commander of the air forces depot to carry out a mission. Under the com-
mand of a Royal Netherlands East Indies Army (KNIL) senior NCO, H.D.
Rijhiner, a number of volunteers launched the attack, but it soon became
clear that it would be impossible to overpower the German troops without
reinforcements. The crew of the armoured vehicle sent as reinforcements
saw little point in a battle, however. They had to be forced by a Dutch cap-
tain to advance further.
When a short time later the firing became heavier and started to come from
the houses along the road, the armoured vehicle suddenly reversed at top
speed, with the result that one infantryman was killed and another was hit
by the vehicle.
The captain rushed to help, but he too was hit so hard “that his left leg was
partially shattered and his right leg was broken in three places.”7 Several
more Dutchmen were killed in the attack, including Sergeant J.J. Versteegen,
who had volunteered for the mission. The Dutch attack was halted after the
incident with the armoured vehicle.
The next day, however, the assault on von Sponeck’s troops was re-
sumed, this time mainly by three reinforced infantry battalions from
Delft. This assault was led by Lieutenant Colonel H.D. Scherpenhuijzen,
the commander of the Rifles Regiment. The battalions progressed slowly,
despite the fact that some NCOs, such as Sergeant W.J. Kenninck, were
7 M.R.H. Calmeyer and V.E. Nierstrasz, De strijd om Rotterdam, Mei 1940 (The Hague,
1952) 163.
The Obermusikmeister of the 47th Infantry Regiment, which captured Valkenburg
airfield on 10 May, wrote a Präsentiermarsch in honour of the occasion
and presented the score to his regiment commander.
Junkers Ju-52 transport aircraft at Valkenburg airfield, burnt out after the shelling by III-2 RA
on 10 May. To the left in the background is a Junkers W-34, with a damaged Dornier Do-17
bomber next to it.
leading the forward troops personally. The Dutch soldiers frequently

had to seek cover from low-flying German aircraft, which in any event
took little action against the Dutch advance. Before the German troops in
Overschie could actually be attacked, however, the bombing of Rotterdam
had already brought hostilities to an end.8
Conclusion
The battle around The Hague produced a relatively high number of losses.
On the Dutch side, almost 500 men died, 80 of whom were killed in the
bombing of the ‘Nieuwe Alexander’ Barracks (10 May) and 24 of whom
died in the surprise attack on Ockenburg airfield. The number of German
dead was not recorded accurately, but was probably equivalent to Dutch
losses. At least 800 German prisoners of war were evacuated to England
via IJmuiden on 13 and 14 May on the S.S. Phrontis and the S.S. Texel-
stroom, respectively. Most of them must have belonged to 22nd Air Trans-
portable Division and the percentage of paratroops would thus have been
small. Various publications mention a figure of 1,200. In contrast to what
is sometimes claimed, this figure—whether it was 800 or 1,200—represents
a surmountable loss of combat power. Also, one should bear in mind that
about two-thirds of the 22nd Air Transportable Division stayed out of the
fighting, given that it was already clear during the morning of 10 May that
it would be impossible to fly in any more reinforcements.
The German air force also suffered losses, and quite considerable ones
too. F.J. Molenaar says on this matter:
The total losses of German aircraft in the Netherlands amounted to 328, in
other words in ten days more than 12% of the combined losses of 2,694 air-
craft inflicted on the Luftwaffe by the air-defence organisations of Denmark,
Norway, Netherlands, Belgium and France and by the air forces of the United
Kingdom.9
Later figures are even higher. E.H. Brongers puts the total number of air-
craft lost in the battle for the Netherlands at at least 525, although this
figure includes all aircraft that were removed from the operations, both
temporarily and definitively. The Dutch Air War Study Group 1939-1945
defines a loss in the same way as the Luftwaffe itself did during the Second
8 Kamerling, Vesting Holland, 308-317.

9 F.J. Molenaar, De luchtverdediging mei 1940 (The Hague, 1970) 944. See also: J.N.
Fernhout, “Het verband tussen de Luftwaffe-verliezen in mei ’40 en de Duitse invasieplan-
nen voor Engeland”, Militaire Spectator, CLXI (1992) 364-371.
202 chapter six
World War, namely if the degree of destruction of the aircraft was 60%
or higher. According to this definition, the total losses amounted to 375
aircraft. This included approximately 160 Junkers Ju-52 transport aircraft.
The fighting around The Hague provides a good insight into the strong-
er and weaker aspects of Dutch military operations. Small-scale, daring
missions by a few officers, NCOs and other ranks to capture a particu-
lar point were usually successful. Subsequent attacks by larger groups, on
the other hand, exposed the weaknesses in the command process. One of
the shortcomings was the coordination of the various troop movements.
Time and time again, it proved that the troops did not have a sufficiently
good command of mobile and offensive combat. The first fire engage-
ment, therefore, often halted the forward movement, which was then fol-
lowed by a retreat, whether ordered or not. We should not forget in all this
that the sudden baptism of fire threw many into a state of turmoil and that
there was no time to gain any combat experience. The battle in Fortress
Holland was fought in an atmosphere of chaos. The units of the 1st Corps
frequently had to follow up reports, usually based on mistaken observa-
tions, of new parachute landings. This exhausted the troops unnecessarily.
On top of that, suspicions of betrayal and reports of operations by secret
agents, summarised under the fear of a fifth column, contributed to the
general sense of danger felt by civilians as well as military personnel.
The German troops had on their side the great advantage that they had
a clear idea of what their mission was. During their preparations, it was
impressed upon them that the Dutch army did not amount to much and
that victory by means of robust action was theirs for the taking. That did
not turn out to be the case. During the air transport, confusion arose be-
cause of navigational errors and the actions of the Dutch anti-aircraft de-
fences. Only a third of the division reached The Hague and even then not
always at the planned locations. That had an adverse effect on morale. The
fighting on the ground drew heavily on the Germans’ combat power, espe-
cially when they came under artillery fire. This explains why approximate-
ly a third of the landed troops were taken prisoner. However, the groups
who managed to mount a staunch defence, such as those in Overschie and
Valkenburg, were able to hold out until 15 May. Clearing these pockets of
resistance turned out to be too onerous a task for the Dutch army.
In Dutch historical accounts of May 1940, much attention has always
been focused on German violations of the law of war. De Jong, for in-
stance, said on this matter: “Also in Ockenburg, at two points in the Maas
Line and on the Grebbeberg, defenceless prisoners of war were killed and
that too may have happened more often. Dead men don’t talk.”10 He thus
endorses the declaration made by Lieutenant General J.J.G. baron van
Voorst tot Voorst to the Parliamentary Inquiry Commission. It has to be
said, however, that as far as Ockenburg is concerned, it is not clear what
evidence Van Voorst tot Voorst possessed.
Because of this, it is also useful to note that the airborne troops had
serious problems with their prisoners of war. At Ypenburg they had many,
as they did at Valkenburg, and all in the turmoil of battle. There were few
victims among them. It is fair to conclude, therefore, that, barring excep-
tions, the Germans’ treatment of prisoners of war—as far as the fighting
around The Hague was concerned—attested to a good level of discipline.11
L. de Jong, Het Koninkrijk der Nederlanden in de Tweede Wereldoorlog. Deel 3. Mei

10 ��
��
’40 (The Hague, 1970) 332.
More comprehensive is H. Amersfoort, ‘Ik had mijn roode-kruis band afgedaan’.
11 ��
��
Oorlogsrecht en gedragingen van Nederlandse en Duitse militairen in gevecht, mei 1940 (The
Hague, 2005).
CHAPTER SEVEN
DISPUTED TERRITORY: THE BATTLE IN THE DUTCH

PROVINCES OF LIMBURG, NOORD-BRABANT AND ZEELAND
Introduction
The German invasion of the Netherlands was, as has been mentioned ear-
lier, the task of the 18th Army. Part of this army was to attack the eastern
front of Fortress Holland to the north of the major rivers. The German
attack was, however, concentrated to the south of the rivers: “Simulta-
neously, to the south of the rivers the 18th Army’s main force is to take
the bridges across the Hollands Diep at Moerdijk and the Oude Maas at
Dordrecht in cooperation with special units.” The main bridges between
Moerdijk and Rotterdam were to be captured by paratroops. It was essen-
tial for these troops to be joined quickly by the 18th Army. The link-up
with the paratroops was not the only task assigned to the XXVIth Corps.
During the march through Noord-Brabant this army corps was also to
protect the left flank of the 18th Army against attacks from “enemy forc-
es in the Antwerp area”. Which troops were to be deployed for the latter
and which for further attacks on Fortress Holland was not yet clear: “The
army will decide in due course whether following arrival in the Breda area
units of the XXVIth Corps can be turned to the north for use in the battle
for Fortress Holland.”1
In view of the importance of the advance through Noord-Brabant, Hit-
ler earmarked the 9th Panzer Division under the command of Generalma-
jor Alfred Ritter von Hubicki for this task, one of his ten armoured divi-
sions. The path ahead for this division was to be cleared by two infantry
divisions: the 254th Infantry Division, under the command of General-
leutnant Walter Behschnitt and the 256th Infantry Division, commanded
by Generalmajor Alexander Kauffmann. The SS Verfügungsdivision, com-
1 Armee-Oberkommando 18, Abt. 1a, Nr. 1/40, “Angriffsbefehl”, 10 May 1940, in:
Feldzug in Holland u. Belgien 10.5.-1.6.1940. Gen. Kdo. XXVI A.K., Anl.z.K.T.B. 9.5.-
1.6.1940, in: Documentatie Nederlands Instituut voor Militaire Historie Den Haag (DC-
NIMH), Collectie Washington Documenten, no. 178/7.
A German ferry across the river Maas, 13 May 1940.
Dutch command structure in Noord-Brabant and northern Limburg 10 May 1940
XXXX
Field Army
XXX
XX XX XX XX
Peel
(-) 5 6 3 6 1 29
1 2 (-) 3 (-)
2 13 (-) 6 (-) 20x
17 (-) 14 (-)
2 MR 3 7 20
(-)
disputed territory 207
manded by SS Gruppenführer2 Paul Haußer, was also available to fight on

the front line. The armoured division, the SS division and the two infan-
try divisions were part of the XXVIth Corps. This corps’ commander was
General der Artillerie Albert Wodrig. Two other infantry divisions, the
225th and the 208th, were part of this corps, but the latter two divisions re-
mained to the east of the Rhine in reserve for the time being.
Along the route towards Breda, the XXVIth Corps had to pass two
Dutch defence lines: the Maas Line and the Peel-Raam Position. The
objective of the Maas Line was to slow the German advance. The Dutch
troops in Noord-Brabant would then have an opportunity to make them-
selves combat-ready and it would be possible for the IIIrd Corps and the
Light Division to retreat to Fortress Holland. In order to defend the river
Maas, river casemates had been built at all bridges. Between the various
bridges over the Maas, barbed-wire defences had been placed along the
river and behind these dozens of smaller casemates and field fortifica-
tions had been constructed. The Maas Line, including the area guarded
by troops belonging to the Maas-Waal Group, was manned by four border
battalions and five battalions from regular infantry regiments.
At a distance which varied from 9 to 21 kilometres behind the Maas
Line was the Peel-Raam Position. This defence line ran from the Belgian
border first along the Zuid-Willemsvaart Canal, then across the Peel area
via the villages of Griendtsveen and Mill to Grave on the river Maas.
Much of the area through which this defence line ran was boggy and dif-
ficult for any attacker to cross. In the northern section of the position,
where there were no natural obstacles, what was known as the Defence
Canal had been dug in 1939. There were also numerous casemates, many
of the S-type, a casemate type capable of delivering frontal and flanking
fire, also referred to as the ‘porcupine’. The Peel-Raam Position was there-
fore not in itself weak, but the garrison comprising what was known as
the Peel Division was numerically insufficient for repelling a strong at-
tack. Between Grave and the Belgian border there were thirteen regular
infantry battalions, a border battalion and a few support units. The divi-
sion also had six infantry battalions of the IIIrd Corps under its command.
These twenty battalions were spread along the Maas Line and the Peel-
Raam Position.
This force was insufficient to provide long-term opposition. This was,
of course, a consequence of the decision taken by General H.G. Winkel-
man in April 1940 not to defend this position, but Fortress Holland in-
2 SS Gruppenführer is equal in rank to Generalmajor. For a full list of rank equivalents,

see Annex.
208 chapter seven
stead. This decision did not help the Peel Division’s position. “I had no
artillery, no antitank guns, no signals, no ammunition train, no anti-air-
craft artillery, no anti-aircraft guns; I had nothing, nothing, nothing”, in
the words of the Peel Division’s commander, Colonel L.J. Schmidt, after
the war.
They could have built the whole thing into an amazing complex and thus
restricted the movement of the attacking force, but they didn’t want to. I
begged them to do so, but in vain. My forces were fragmented across many
casemates which were constructed alongside each other. There was no
depth. You couldn’t fight in those circumstances.3
The army leadership was, of course, aware of the lack of opportunities

open to the Peel Division. The order issued to Colonel Schmidt was to
slow the advance of the enemy and in the event of German combat supe-
riority to retreat whilst delaying the German advance. The troops defend-
ing the Peel-Raam Position, however, were told to fight to the last man
and were not informed of the plan to pull back the IIIrd Corps and the
Light Division to behind the major rivers immediately following a Ger-
man invasion. In practice, they could do nothing other than hope for rap-
id support from French or other allied troops. If these guardian angels did
not appear, however, then Noord-Brabant was certainly lost.
Operations against the bridges over the river Maas
With a view to being able to reach the Moerdijk bridges in one quick push,
the German troops had to breach the Dutch defence lines quickly. In the
autumn of 1939, Hitler came up with the idea of capturing the bridges
over the Maas by deploying assault squads in order subsequently to open
a rapid attack on the Peel-Raam Position. The Germans had to take at
least a few of the bridges across the Maas: not just for the advance by the
XXVIth Corps, but also for the 6th Army, which was to invade Belgium
via southern Limburg under the command of Generaloberst Walther von
Reichenau. The plans for capturing the various bridges were drawn up by
the German military counterintelligence service or Abwehr. To this end, this
service led by Admiral Wilhelm Canaris formed a number of special units
such as the Bau-Lehrbataillon zur besondere Verwendung 800 in Branden-
burg and the Bataillon zur besondere Verwendung 100 in Breslau. These
units were partially manned by Dutch WA personnel (military section
3 Testimony of L.J. Schmidt, 23 March 1948, in: Enquêtecommissie Regeringsbeleid 1940-

1945. Verslag houdende de uitkomsten van het onderzoek. Deel Ic (The Hague, 1949) 274.
Pioneers of the German 254th Infantry Division lay a pontoon bridge across the Maas on 10
May 1940. In the background is the burning village of Katwijk aan de Maas.
of the Dutch National Socialist Movement, NSB), who lived in Germany

and who had organised themselves into the ‘gymnastics club’ Sport en Spel
(sport and games). The group’s leader was Hubert Köhler, a former house
painter from Limburg.
The conquering of the bridges which the XXVIth Corps was to use ac-
cording to the operational plans was charged to a group belonging to the
Brandenburg-Bataillon, which was under the command of Oberleutnant
Wilhelm Walther and stationed in Asperden, near Goch in the Rhineland.
This battalion comprised “approximately thirty supporters of Anton Mus-
sert [leader of the NSB] and about eighty German army comrades”.4 The
most important bridge to be captured was the railway bridge at Gennep,
as the Germans wished to breach the Peel-Raam Position via this river
crossing, using an armoured train and a goods train containing the IIIrd
battalion of the 481st Infantry Regiment, commanded by Major Rüdi
Schenk. Other targets included the bridges over the Maas-Waal Canal at
Heumen, Malden and Hatert and over the Maas at Grave. It was to be ex-
pected that there would be traffic congestion at the bridge at Gennep and
an alternative route was found for the 9th Panzer Division via the bridg-
4 L. de Jong, Het Koninkrijk der Nederlanden in de Tweede Wereldoorlog, Deel 2. Neu-

traal (The Hague, 1969) 491.
210 chapter seven
es across the Maas-Waal Canal and at Grave. The operation on 10 May

against the railway bridge at Gennep, in which the bridge across the small
river Niers and Gennep railway station were also targets, was led per-
sonally by Oberleutnant Walther. His assault squad also included several
members of Sport en Spel.
The appointed hour was early on the morning of 10 May. The guards
at the bridge over the Niers were overcome by a group of about twenty
soldiers, after which the two German trains headed towards Gennep sta-
tion. The soldiers guarding this station surrendered without putting up any
resistance, but the personnel of the Marechaussee (military police force
which also carried out civilian police tasks in rural areas) who were on the
spot telephoned the sentry post at the eastern end of the bridge and re-
ported: “Gennep captured, blow up the bridge!”5 Precisely at that moment,
however, this sentry post was attacked by Walther’s section. Nine men
from the Brandenburg-Bataillon, three of whom were dressed in Dutch
Marechaussee uniforms, overpowered the sentries and reassured the sen-
try post on the west bank by informing them by telephone that two Mare-
chaussee personnel would bring four German prisoners across the bridge.
The sentries on the west bank believed this message and the sentry in
the middle of the bridge allowed the two ‘Marechaussee personnel’ and
the four ‘prisoners’ to pass unhindered. The prisoners were delivered to
the sentry post, searched and taken away. Their hidden sub-machine guns
and hand grenades went unnoticed. “On being taken prisoner we were
searched for weapons, during which they only felt in our pockets and
therefore only took a few of our arms”, Walther later remembered.6 In the
meantime, the two German trains approached the bridge. In response, the
sentry at the middle of the bridge telephoned his commander on the west
bank to ask whether he should blow up the bridge. The commander or-
dered him to wait to be on the safe side. A few moments later, at 04.00
hrs, the sentry post on the west bank was overrun and the German trains
containing an entire infantry battalion were able to cross the bridge unim-
peded and continue on towards the Peel-Raam Position. The German ad-
vance had only just begun, but the Maas Line had already been breached.
Elsewhere, too, the German Abwehr succeeded in capturing undam-
aged bridges near the German border. In southern Limburg, the bridges
over the Juliana Canal at Stein, Urmond, Berg, Obbicht and Roosteren
were taken. Partly as a result of this, the German 6th Army was able to
5 Testimony of J.A. Tak, 8 June 1948, in: Enquêtecommissie Regeringsbeleid. Deel Ic, 434.
6 Letter from Wilhelm Walther to Law Courts in ’s-Hertogenbosch, 5 November 1947,
in: DC-NIMH, Strijd Nederlands Grondgebied, box 515, file 15.
German 37mm antitank gun in position after crossing the river Maas, 10 May 1940.
One of the places at which the IVth Corps crossed the Maas was Maastricht. Picture of the
movement of a 37mm Panzerabwehrkanone across the river, with tractor (half-track).
212 chapter seven
enter Belgium via Limburg virtually unopposed. At 09.30 hrs, Lieutenant

Colonel A. Govers, the Territorial Commander in southern Limburg, was
forced to surrender Maastricht to German troops after he had informed
General Winkelman by carrier pigeon and by radio that he was complete-
ly surrounded.7
To the north of Gennep, the bridges across the Maas-Waal Canal at
Malden and Heumen were captured. The company commander at the
Malden bridge, Reserve Captain A.W.J. Peeters, had, on realising that the
Germans had crossed the border, responded in an alert manner:
I request and obtain communications with the bridge sentry and give the
order ‘Destroy the bridge’. Everything seems to be in order. I go outside to
watch the explosion. Nothing happens. I wait for a while; again I ask the
telephonist to connect me to the bridge. He gets a connection. He drops the
receiver in fright..., an unknown voice had said to him: ‘Ich wollte den Herr
Commandant sprechen’.
In response, Peeters formed a group comprising kitchen personnel and

telephonists and armed them with one light machine gun. In spite of this
limited weaponry, they succeeded in taking the Germans by surprise. In
their panic the Germans decided to surrender. It was therefore possible to
blow up the bridge after all.8
The route to Noord-Brabant via Heumen remained. For this, however,
the German troops needed to reach the bridge at Grave as speedily as pos-
sible. The commander of Gruppe Grave, which was charged with this task,
Major Einstmann, did not prove energetic enough, however. When a wor-
ried intelligence officer from the XXVIth Corps went to find out what was
going on in the afternoon, he found the major fast asleep! By this time,
the bridge at Grave had been blown up. The corps staff concluded on the
evening of 10 May:
The lack of success of the Gruppe Grave is disappointing. It can be attributed
to the unexpectedly strong opposition met to the east of the Maas-Waal Ca-
nal and to the impression that operations were not carried out flexibly and
forward-looking enough.9
The 9th Panzer Division now also had to advance via Gennep.
7 C.D. Kamerling, De krijgsverrichtingen in Zuid-Limburg, Mei 1940 (The Hague, 1952)

68-71.
8 A.W.J. Peeters, “Gebeurtenissen bij 1-1-26 R.I. op 10 mei 1940”, in: DC-NIMH, Strijd
Nederlands Grondgebied, box 515, file 9a.
9 Generalkommando XXVI. A.K., Beurteilung der Lage am 10.5. 22.00 Uhr, in: DC-
NIMH, Strijd Nederlands Grondgebied, box 551, file 11.
A German column passes a border road block in southern Limburg on the morning of 10 May.
Dutch command structure in and near Noord-Brabant after 10 May 1940
Commander-in-Chief
of the
Land and Sea Forces
XX
Commander of Peel
Fortress Holland
20x
Spui Kil XX
Group Group 20
(-)
Southern front
of Fortress Holland
2 MR *)
3 6 *) 2 nd Hussars-Motorcyclist Regiment was removed

from the Light Division on 10 May and placed
temporarily under the command of the Commander
of the Peel Division for the counterattack at Mill.
214 chapter seven
The fact that the Maas Line had been breached at Gennep did not
mean that Dutch troops elsewhere gave up the fight. It was precisely the
lack of good communications that ensured that units were unaware of
events elsewhere, and consequently they continued the fight undaunted.
The Germans attempted to cross the Maas at over ten different locations.
These attempts were preceded by heavy shelling, and the lightest Dutch
casemates proved unable to withstand German shells. Next, the Germans
crossed the river in rubber dinghies with the aim of putting the casemates
out of action one by one. There was sporadic courageous opposition from
the Dutch soldiers, however. For example, in the most southern part of
the Maas Line at Wessem, Private B. Beekmans continued to fire on the
Germans from an S-type casemate when the rest of his comrades had
already fled. In the end, after they had eliminated the remaining Dutch
troops in the sector, the Germans sent four Dutch prisoners of war to the
casemate in order to persuade Beekmans to give up the fight. When they
arrived in the casemate they found that he was already dead.10
Near Grubbenvorst, too, German military personnel, in this case the
56th Infantry Division, came up against tough opposition. Private C.J.H.
Sleegers in particular distinguished himself. An excellent marksman, he
succeeded in impeding initial German attempts to cross the river. After
his section commander had been wounded and the remaining members
of his section had retreated, he continued to fight until a severe wound put
him out of action.11 Near Boxmeer, the Germans had their hands full with
the soldiers in a few Dutch casemates, who destroyed a number of Ger-
man rubber dinghies during their attempts to cross the Maas. Two other
attempts were also thwarted. However, when casemate 67 was penetrated
by two 8.8cm shells, killing two of the three soldiers inside, Dutch oppo-
sition also seemed to have been dealt a severe blow. Casemate 65, com-
manded by Sergeant J.M.A.F. van Rooijen, continued to fire even though
the air circulation system was not functioning. “The powder smoke was
very thick and almost burned the mucous membrane in our noses and
mouths.” Their firing had its desired effect, however:
Boat after boat capsized and their contents sank below the surface. The more
losses there were on the other side, the more vicious the enemy artillery fire
became. (...) A heavy grenade landed at the bottom left of the embrasure.
The armoured steel curled. Everything was twisted and contorted. Another
J.J.C.P. Wilson, “Het gevecht bij Wessem”, De Militaire Spectator, CXIV (1945) 126-
10 ��
��
127.
J.J.C.P. Wilson, “Het gevecht bij Grubbenvorst”, De Militaire Spectator, CX (1941)
11 ��
��
227-228.
grenade landed and the gun knocked me in the chest. I was dizzy (...) Case-
mate 65 was finished.12
This kind of Dutch opposition elsewhere along the Maas impressed the
Chief of Staff of the 56th Infantry Division during the evening of 10 May:
Dutch soldiers have offered strong opposition today at a few positions. The
opposition faced by the 171st Infantry Regiment at Broekhuizen, the 192nd
Infantry Regiment at Grubbenvorst and the 234th Infantry Regiment at Ble-
rick proves that the Dutch can fight.13
At St Agatha, a village north of Gennep, there was another typical example

of Dutch action. As at Wessem and Grubbenvorst, one determined Dutch
soldier, in this case Sergeant A.M. Schouten, gave a large German unit a
fair amount of trouble. Schouten decided, on discovering a German rifle
position on the opposite bank of the Maas, to deviate from his orders only
to fire on armoured vehicles and aimed his 8-Staal gun at the enemy. “This
was done under a constant hail of bullets. The other soldiers were unable
to help; they had completely lost their bearings.” In spite of this, he suc-
ceeded in destroying the German machine-gun position. “The third shot
was a direct hit at the lower centre of the position. Its effect was to virtually
obliterate the machine-gun position, we received no further fire from that
direction.” After this, however, the Schouten section came under heavy fire
from German artillery. Soldier after soldier was hit by shrapnel. Schouten
eventually lost consciousness.14 Partly thanks to his actions, the Germans
were not able to cross the Maas at St Agatha until 11.00 hrs.
In spite of the vigorous action of individual Dutch soldiers, the vul-
nerable Maas Line fell. The German forces were simply too strong. From
Maasbracht to Nijmegen, nine Dutch infantry battalions had had to op-
pose six entire German divisions. To a large extent, however, the Maas
Line had fulfilled its role: to slow the enemy’s advance. There were virtu-
ally no attacks on the Peel-Raam Position on 10 May. The essential thing,
however, was that the railway bridge at Gennep fell into German hands
undamaged, which enabled two trains carrying the IIIrd battalion of the
481st Infantry Regiment to head along the railway towards Mill and thus
towards the Peel-Raam Position.
12 ��
��
Report by J.M.A.F. van Rooijen, 27 December 1940, in: DC-NIMH, Strijd Neder-
lands Grondgebied, box 524, file 36.
13 ��
56. Inf. Division, Ia, Kriegstagebuch zum Ärmelkanal bei der 6. Armee
��
��
9.5.1940, in:
DC-NIMH, Strijd Nederlands Grondgebied, box 559f.
14 ��
A.M.
��
Schouten, Report on incident on 10 May 1940 at the pedestrian ferry across
the Maas at St Agatha, 29 January 1941, in: DC-NIMH, Strijd Nederlands Grondgebied,
box 552, file 10.
German Panzer-
kampfwagen I in the
streets of Rosmalen,
10 May 1940 (left);
German artillery
command post at Mook,
10 May 1940 (below).
The battle at Mill
While at this point few people in the Netherlands realised that war had
broken out, two German trains were heading towards the Noord-Bra-
bant village of Mill, one of the most important tactical positions along
the Peel-Raam Position. In addition to the Gennep-Boxtel railway line, a
number of roads ran via Mill. In principle, the terrain around the village
was well-suited to being defended as it formed a plateau high enough to
dominate the surrounding area. The constructed defence works were, how-
ever, meant to be manned by a much larger number of personnel than was
present on 10 May. Instead of the VIth Division, which was part of the IIIrd
Corps, there were only three infantry battalions (I-3 RI, I-6 RI and III-14
RI), which possessed no modern antitank artillery. The artillery present
also left something to be desired; it was only on 7 May that the battalions
received reinforcements from a battalion of the 20th Artillery Regiment,
equipped with twelve 8-Staal guns from the artillery reserves. The troops
at Mill formed part of Schayk Sector, under the command of Reserve Lieu-
tenant Colonel J. Detmar. In the area immediately surrounding Mill there
was the Ist battalion of the 3rd Infantry Regiment, commanded by Major A.
Netze, while the Ist battalion of the 6th Infantry Regiment, commanded by
Major A.J.M. Allard, occupied the position slightly to the north. The artil-
lery battalion was deployed along the Mill–Langenboom road.
On the night of 9 May, at approximately 01.00 hrs, Major Netze was
awakened by a telephone call giving orders from the Peel Division’s com-
mander to man all positions at 03.00 hrs. Netze warned his company
commanders and everyone was in position at the appointed hour. Just af-
ter three o’clock, German aircraft appeared over Mill. Reality was slow in
taking hold among most of the men. “I still couldn’t really believe that war
had broken out, but thought it was an attack on England,” Major Netze
said later.15 Then, to the utter amazement of many of the Dutch soldiers, a
grey train “comprising four wagons and a locomotive” rode past at a speed
of 20 to 30 kilometres an hour.
On the rear, flat wagon there were I think four pieces of anti-aircraft artil-
lery. We stood staring open-mouthed at the train, and I said without think-
ing: ‘Do we have those things too?’ I had hardly finished saying it when
shots were fired from the train using light automatic weapons. By throwing
15 ��
Report
��
by Commander of I-3 Infantry Regiment on events on 10 and 11 May 1940,
21 June 1940, in: DC-NIMH, Strijd Nederlands Grondgebied, box 521, file 58.
Field graves of soldiers of the third battalion of the German 481st Infantry Regiment
at Mill. Photograph taken in June 1940.
The heavily shelled S-type casemate no. 66 at the Peel-Raam Position.

ourselves flat on the ground and crawling on our stomachs we managed to

escape the fire.16
The Peel-Raam Position at Mill had now become the front line.
The crew of the German armoured train had spent the first few hours of
war in great suspense. Their passage across the undamaged railway bridge
at Gennep was a relief, however. The train continued towards the Peel-
Raam Position. “We passed through Mill. Suddenly there was heavy firing
from bunkers, it was the Dutch defence line, the Peel-Raam Position”, one
eyewitness said later.17 The armoured train, followed by the troop train,
was able to continue through the Dutch defence line unimpeded; the two
trains only stopped about 3.5 kilometres west of Mill, near the small stop
of Zeeland. The majority of the IIIrd battalion of the 481st Infantry Regi-
ment got off the train here, while the armoured train was shunted with
a view to returning to make contact with the advancing German troops.
The Dutch soldiers stationed where the railway crossed the Defence Canal
had not been idle, however. Led by Reserve Lieutenant M. van Velden,
they placed a beam-post obstacle on the track, while three sappers dug up
a number of live landmines and placed them under the tracks.
We were just about finished when the returning train reached a point about
200 metres away (...) We stood quite near to watch what would happen to
the train, not aware of being in any danger.18
The armoured train continued at speed and was derailed. “There was sud-
denly a terrible bang (..) everything flew about, the train stopped”, one of
the German passengers remembered later. “What is going on? No-one
can see anything!”19 The Dutch troops immediately opened fire, but the
armour on the train provided the Germans with good cover. They in turn
fired on the Dutch troops, and subsequently attacked and captured two
casemates to the south of the railway line.
In the meantime, the battalion that had reached the Zeeland stop in
the goods train had also disembarked. The battalion commander, Major
Schenk, soon gained the impression that only the casemates and positions
were occupied on the Dutch side and that there were no reserve forces to
16 ��
Report
��
on events witnessed by Reserve Captain L.H.M. Muris from 10 to 13 May
1940, Commander of 3-I-3 Infantry Regiment, 10 June 1940, in: DC-NIMH, Strijd Neder-
Unteroffizier Apel, “Das Unternehmen des Panzerzuges 1”, Militär-Wochenblatt,
17 ��
��
Unabhängige Zeitschrift für die deutsche Wehrmacht, CXXV (1940) 1044.
18 ��
Statement
��
by M. van Velden, 2 November 1950, in: DC-NIMH, Strijd Nederlands
Grondgebied, box 521, file 63.
19 ��
Apel,
��
“Das Unternehmen des Panzerzuges 1”, 1044.
220 chapter seven
The derailed armoured train at Mill.
the rear. He decided to attempt a surprise attack on the Dutch troops from
the rear.20 To this end, he ordered two operations: one in a north-easterly
direction and one to the south. Major Schenk personally led the north-
easterly attack, which he conducted with two companies.
This advance was noticed by the commander of the 1st battery of the IIIrd
battalion of the 20th Artillery Regiment, Reserve Lieutenant H.J. Mulder.
This battery’s 8-Staal guns were pointing eastwards, however, and had no
infantry protection at all. “As I had no machine guns for anti-aircraft or
close-combat purposes, I immediately telephoned the Battalion Command-
er for permission for my battery to fire on the advancing enemy,” Mulder
said later. His battalion commander, Reserve Captain S.L. Groenewoud,
gave permission to fire one gun, which proved inadequate. Mulder now de-
cided to turn his entire battery more than 90° and to open fire using all the
weaponry at his disposal. This also proved unequal to the task of halting
the German advance. “As the enemy was apparently not to be put off by the
fire from my battery, or at least continued to advance, I asked for assistance
from the two other batteries.” With great difficulty—“everything about the
outdated 8-cm Staal works with difficulty”—the guns were turned.21 Firing
also turned out to be difficult. Captain Groenewoud later remembered:
20 ��
“Bericht
��
Infanterie-Regiment 481, über den Durchbruch durch die Peelstelling bei
Mill om 10.5.1940”, in: A. Claassens and G. de Kruijff, eds., Het gevecht bij Mill. Herdenk-
ingsboek “10 mei 1940 Mill” (Mill 1980) 130.
21 ��
H.J.
��
Mulder, “Gevechtsbericht van 1-III-20 R.A.”, 6 October 1940, in: DC-NIMH,
Due to the risk from our own firing, the method of shooting was (...) such
that only one gun per battery could fire at a time, while those manning the
guns further forward had to duck and take cover in the trench from the fire
and the air blasts.22
The Germans, who had advanced to 400 metres, were eventually driven
back by the sixty-year-old 8-Staal guns.
The 2nd company under Schenk, which followed a more southerly
route, did not have to face Dutch artillery. It was able to capture a number
of casemates without a fight, and 210 prisoners were taken from the lines,
including a number of officers.23 Part of the Peel-Raam Position manned
by the 3rd Infantry Regiment was now therefore in German hands, and it
was still only 07.30 hrs. That the success of the Germans was not more
widespread was due to the actions of the 2nd section of 3-I-3 RI, led by
Reserve Lieutenant G. Bleeker. This section halted the German company
which was advancing in a southerly direction. “We were able”, Bleeker
said, “to open fire in such a way that the enemy retreated towards the rail-
way embankment.”24 The situation remained extremely serious for the
Dutch, however. If the IIIrd battalion of the 481st Infantry Regiment could
not be driven out of the Peel-Raam Position, a rapid German advance
through Noord-Brabant could not be ruled out.
In these critical circumstances, there was little leadership in evidence
from the commander of the Peel Division, Colonel Schmidt. He devoted
a great deal of attention to moving his own headquarters, first from Eind-
hoven to Hout near Helmond, then from Hout to Vught. Schmidt did,
however, order Reserve Captain M.W. Boässon, a Peel Division staff of-
ficer, to go to Hasselt in order to contact the Belgian military commander
there.25 Major General A.A. van Nijnatten, commander of the IIIrd Corps,
responded in a more alert fashion. The withdrawal of both his own corps
and that of Light Division was, after all, at risk. As early as 05.15 hrs, he
therefore decided to deploy the 2nd Hussars-Motorcyclists Regiment
against the German troops at Mill. The commander of the hussars, Lieu-
tenant Colonel A.J.E. Mathon, was given the following order:
22 ��
S.L.
��
Groenewoud, “Oorlogsbericht van III-20 R.A. (Mill)”, 19 September 1940, in:
DC-NIMH, Strijd Nederlands Grondgebied, box 528, file 39.
“Bericht Infanterie-Regiment 481” in: Claassens and De Kruijff, Gevecht bij Mill, 131.
23 ��
��
24 ��
��
G. Bleeker, “Verslag van de verrichtingen van de 2e sectie van 3-I-3 R.I.”, 16 May
25 ��
Captain M.W. Boässon was killed while carrying out this order. He crossed a bridge
��
over the Scheldt-Maas Canal just as it was blown up.
222 chapter seven
Enemy has used armoured train to pass through own troop position. Bat-
talion command post allowed itself to be overrun and has been captured.
Drive back the enemy so that the old position west of Mill is reestablished.26
The hussars-motorcyclist were not particularly quick to carry out their

orders. It was not until 07.00 hrs that the regiment left, comprising 500
men and only armed with 24 machine guns and four light antitank guns,
and headed towards Mill, incidentally without Lieutenant Colonel Ma-
thon taking the trouble to contact the commander of the Schayk Sector,
Lieutenant Colonel Detmar. The latter could have advised him to attack
the German troops in the lines from the northwest, via Lagepeel and Lan-
genboom, in view of the cover provided by the terrain there. Instead, the
commander of the 2nd Hussars-Motorcyclists Regiment positioned his 2nd
Squadron on either side of the railway line and his 1st Squadron further
south. This positioning took up so much time that they could not advance
until the afternoon. The advance of the hussars was extremely slow, chiefly
due to their advancing through open terrain with few opportunities for
cover. The two squadrons were eventually halted by the barbed wire de-
fences and minefields of their own Peel-Raam Position. Only four case-
mates (522 to 525) were successfully recaptured; along the railway line,
the IIIrd battalion of the 481st Infantry Regiment remained in control.
In the meantime, the two German divisions which were supposed to
advance towards Mill were encountering difficulties in crossing the Maas.
The heavy materiel of the 254th Infantry Division, for example, could not
yet be taken across the river as a pontoon bridge first had to be construct-
ed. The 256th Infantry Division encountered largely the same problems,
but this division’s 481st Infantry Regiment had at least been able to enter
Noord-Brabant via the captured railway bridge at Gennep. A little after
12.00 hrs, the regiment’s Ist and IInd battalions arrived in Mill and St Hu-
bert, respectively. Regiment commander Oberstleutnant Friedrich Weber
installed himself and his staff in the town hall at Mill. Weber wanted to
penetrate the Peel-Raam Position as quickly as possible, as everything
pointed to the Dutch being taken completely by surprise. The artillery fire
intermittently aimed at Mill was after all quite weak, while the action by
his regiment’s IIIrd battalion must also have been a success, although he
had no idea where that battalion now was. The attack from Mill and St
Hubert was to be continued from 15.50 hrs and supported by the artillery
which, Weber assumed, was now on its way to Mill.27
26 ��
Diary
��
of the 2nd Hussars-Motorcylist Regiment running from 10 May 1940 up to and
including 15 May 1940, in: DC-NIMH, Strijd Nederlands Grondgebied, box 530, file 58.
“Bericht Infanterie-Regiment 481” in: Claassens and De Kruijff, Gevecht bij Mill,
27 ��
��
133-136.
The demolished Wilhelmina bridge at Maastricht, 14 May 1940.
XXVI. Armeekorps 12 mei

10-12 1940
May1940
XXX
26
XX XX XX XX
9 254 256 SSV (-)
9 454 456 D
474 476
X 484 481
9 G
254 256
10
DivTr DivTr SS
33 254 256
11 DivTr
SS
102
XX XX
DivTr
9
225 208
333 309
376 337
377 338
225 208
DivTr DivTr
225 208
Reserve units
224 chapter seven
This assumption proved, however, to be over-optimistic. Near Gennep,

where the German engineers had laid a pontoon bridge across the Maas,
traffic chaos reigned. Firstly, the bridge had quickly become unservice-
able: “Hugely delayed due to technical difficulties, it was hardly ready
for use when a heavy armoured vehicle drove across it and broke it once
more.” There was subsequently a great deal of jostling for position:
Due to a lack of traffic coordination, there were terrible jams near the
bridge. Three columns alongside each other, each of which wanted priority,
made crossing difficult. It was impossible to get through in a car.
This chaos meant, among other things, that the artillery destined for the
attack on the Peel-Raam Position could not reach the 481st Infantry Regi-
ment. It was only on the evening of 10 May that the Feldgendarmerie in-
tervened, after which the various troops were able cross the Maas in a
more orderly fashion.28
Oberstleutnant Weber waited until 14.50 hrs. When by that time there
was still no sign of the artillery, he cancelled the attack. He deemed an
attack without artillery support to be irresponsible, as the Peel-Raam Po-
sition appeared to contain several strong casemates.29 At the command
posts of the XXVIth Corps and the 256th Infantry Division, however, it was
believed that a rapid breach at Mill was essential to avoiding a delay to the
advance on the Moerdijk bridges.
The armoured train behind the Peel-Raam Position, which was having in-
creasing difficulty withstanding the fire from the neighbouring enemy bun-
ker, signalled repeatedly: Infantry Regiment Weber may attack! (...) The
XXVIth Corps and the division were agreed that breaching the Peel-Raam
Position on the evening of 10 May was incredibly important, with a view to
the deployment of the 9th Panzer Division.
The corps and the division were unable, however, to make radio contact
with Oberstleutnant Weber. Subsequently, division commander General-
major Kauffmann sent an ordnance officer, Hauptmann Hertel, by bicycle
to Mill, as well as (to be on the safe side) staff officer Major von Bornstedt
in a Fieseler Storch (small communications aircraft). These two officers
were ordered to inform Weber of the situation and to urge him to force a
breach of the Peel-Raam Position. However, Kauffmann left the final deci-
sion to the commander on the ground.30
28 ��
��
256. Inf.-Division, Ia, Kriegstagebuch Nr. 3, 9.5.1940-31.10.1940, in: DC-NIMH,
Strijd Nederlands Grondgebied, box 559d.
“Bericht Infanterie-Regiment 481” in: Claassens and De Kruijff, Gevecht bij Mill, 137.
29 ��
��
30 ��
256.
��
Inf.-Division, Ia. Kriegstagebuch Nr. 3.
Once they had arrived at Mill, Hertel and von Bornstedt made it clear
to the commander of the 481st Infantry Regiment that he should no longer
count on artillery support; this was confirmed by the commander of the
456th Infantry Regiment, who also reported to Weber’s headquarters. Her-
tel and von Bornstedt advised Weber to attack, which after some thought
the regiment commander did. In Weber’s eyes, however, it remained
a risky operation: after all, he assumed that the IIIrd Corps was still en-
trenched in the Peel-Raam Position. The regiment commander set the
time for the attack at 19.35 hrs, giving his own IInd battalion the main task
of advancing between Mill’s Roman Catholic church and the railway line
towards his ‘surrounded’ IIIrd battalion. The Ist battalion was to attack to
the north of this position. To the south of the 481st Infantry Regiment, the
456th Infantry Regiment, which for the purposes of the assault was placed
under Weber’s command, was also to breach the Peel-Raam Position.31
The German troops were still getting into position ready to commence
the attack when the Luftwaffe put in an appearance, an occurrence to-
tally unexpected by Oberstleutnant Weber. A neighbouring unit had in
fact requested a bombing raid by Stukas prior to its own assault on the
Peel-Raam Position. The aircraft also bombed the Dutch positions near
Mill. The attack on the Dutch positions caused little damage. The effect on
morale, however, was great. “It was a terrifying raid, especially if you real-
ised that they could have used much more powerful bombs. Furthermore,
it was bad for morale as we had absolutely no means of retaliating,” one
captain later remembered. “You had the impression that it was constant,
because it was as if the target was your own dugout or somewhere in the
vicinity.”32 The bombing had the opposite effect on the Germans: “For our
troops, the unexpected support was a great confidence boost.”33
Thus reinforced, the German troops advanced. The shaken Dutch sol-
diers quickly surrendered to German superiority. Reserve Lieutenant M.
van Velden, section commander of 1-I-3 RI, noted in his combat report:
18 hrs. Our position is becoming increasingly difficult. We are surrounded
on three sides and mortars are making the situation untenable. We have one
fatality and several wounded; one machine-gun nest was hit full on and flew
in all directions. 18.45 hrs. The situation is becoming untenable. Being shot
at from three sides (from Mill, from the train, from the enemy on the right
flank). Nothing can be done about it with the three remaining machine guns.
“Bericht Infanterie-Regiment 481” in: Claassens and De Kruijff, Gevecht bij Mill,
31 ��
��
137-140.
32 ��
��
Testimonies of Reserve Captain Van Furth, W.L. given to Commander of 6 Infantry
Regiment on 4 June 1940, in: DC-NIMH, Strijd Nederlands Grondgebied, box 521, file 50.
33 ��
256.
��
A formation of Junkers Ju-87 Sturzkampfflugzeuge (Stuka).
Issue of orders to the commander of the third battalion, Major Peltrek, by the commander
of the 454th Infantry Regiment, Oberst Castorf, at the Peel-Raam Position to the north
of Mill on 11 May 1940.
In the end, all they could do was to try and save their own skins.34
The Peel-Raam Position, referred to rather exaggeratedly by the staff
of the 256th Infantry Division as “the Dutch Maginot Line”, had been
breached.35 This also became clear at Colonel Schmidt’s headquarters. Re-
ports came in “that morale had been shattered and retreating was not just
being thought of, but that several units were in fact already retreating.”36 It
was possible in these circumstances that the entire Peel Division would be
destroyed, and Colonel Schmidt decided to withdraw his troops to behind
the Zuid-Willemsvaart Canal. At 20.30 hrs he issued orders to abandon
the Peel-Raam Position at 24.00 hrs, while he himself moved his com-
mand post yet again, this time to Tilburg.37
On the first day of war, therefore, both the Maas Line and the Peel-
Raam Position had fallen. The Dutch troops positioned at the latter had
allowed themselves to be taken by surprise during the initial stages of the
battle, leading to a number of casemates near Mill falling into German
hands. The commander of the Peel Division, Colonel Schmidt, responded
rather sluggishly, in contrast to Major General Van Nijnatten, the com-
mander of the IIIrd Corps, who immediately sent the 2nd Hussars-
Motorcyclist Regiment to Mill. This regiment’s counterattack ran into
difficulties, however, partly because the commander was not familiar with
the terrain and did not request information from the commanders on the
ground. Things did not always run smoothly on the German side either.
For example, as a result of the chaos at the bridge near Gennep, the 481st
Infantry Regiment lacked artillery support, which led to a planned assault
being cancelled. The commanders of the XXVIth Corps and the 256th In-
fantry Division insisted, however, that regiment commander Oberstleut-
nant Weber attack. It was typical of the German method of command that
the decision as to whether to attack or not was left entirely to Weber. In
retrospect, the regiment commander made the correct decision: he at-
tacked and his regiment definitively breached the Peel-Raam Position.
34 ��
��
Report by M. van Velden, 9 February 1941, in: DC-NIMH, Strijd Nederlands
35 ��
256.
��
36 ��
L.J.
��
Schmidt, “Verslag omtrent de gebeurtenissen van 10 t/m 12 mei 1940 in het
gebied van den T.B.N.Br.”, 19 June 1942, in: DC-NIMH, Strijd Nederlands Grondgebied,
box 521, file 1.
V.E. Nierstrasz, De verdediging van Noord-Limburg en Noord-Brabant. Mei 1940
37 ��
��
(The Hague, 1953) 235.
228 chapter seven
In spite of the rapid fall of the Dutch defence lines, they had fulfilled
their primary task: the IIIrd Corps and the Light Division were able to reach
Fortress Holland almost completely unimpeded. The road to the Moerdijk
bridges, however, was as good as wide open to the German troops.
Passage through Noord-Brabant
To many Dutch soldiers on the Peel-Raam Position, the order to retreat to

behind the Zuid-Willemsvaart Canal came as a complete surprise. In those
parts of the line where not a single German had been sighted, there was
a great deal of doubt as to the wisdom of exchanging a relatively strong
fortification for a canal bank. The retreat was chaotic. Part of the Peel Di-
vision marched on foot to the Zuid-Willemsvaart Canal, others cycled or
drove westwards in commandeered vehicles. Artillery, machine guns and
ammunition were left behind. The mood among the Dutch troops did not
improve when, on arrival at the Zuid-Willemsvaart Canal, it became clear
that this was unsuited to a sustained defence. Most of the ’s‑Hertogen-
bosch–Helmond road on the east bank of the canal was in fact higher than
the west bank. This meant that troops coming from the east could advance
almost unseen.
More importantly, however, part of the Peel Division had not actually
received the order to retreat. The Dutch battalion commanders at Mill (of
I-3 RI and I-6 RI) were not informed of the retreat during the night of 10
May and remained at their stations. The west bank of the Zuid-Willems-
vaart Canal between Middelrode and Dinther, the part to which their
battalions should have retreated, remained completely unoccupied. This
sector included a bridge near Heeswijk which had not been destroyed.
The chances of successfully defending the Zuid-Willemsvaart Canal were
therefore minimal. Perhaps the French troops which were advancing to
Noord-Brabant would be able to offer help.
The French units which were advancing towards the Netherlands
were part of the French 7th Army, commanded by général d’armée Henri-
Honoré Giraud. This army comprised the 1st Light Armoured Division
led by général de brigade F. Picard, général de division Theodore Marcel
Sciard’s Ist Corps, including the 60th Infantry Division led by général de
brigade Marcel Deslaurens, and général de division M.B.A. Fagalde’s XVIth
Corps. On 25 March 1940, général d’armée Giraud had expressed his ar-
my’s task as follows: “Connect Belgian and Dutch defence in the Tilburg-
Turnhout region. Cover the Antwerp, Roosendaal, Dordrecht railway.
Prevent capture of the mouths of the Scheldt and Maas rivers.”38 To achieve
this, Giraud wanted a connected Franco–British–Belgian–Dutch front, in
which it was clear to him that Noord-Brabant would form the weakest
section. He wanted to deploy French troops into that area, but this would
be a risky and time-consuming operation. The 2nd Brigade of the 1st Light
Armoured Division and two reconnaissance units (a groupement un-
der colonel G. de Beauchesne and a groupement under lieutenant-colonel
Lestoquoi) were therefore to be sent on ahead to protect the advance by
the main force of the 7th Army.
After the 7th Army had been alerted at 05.00 hrs on 10 May, the various
units set off at speed. At 22.00 hrs, the Groupement Lestoquoi crossed the
Dutch border at Zundert. It was, however, held up there by Dutch obsta-
cles. In spite of this, lieutenant-colonel Lestoquoi continued on to Breda,
accompanied by Belgian Lieutenant Hautecler, who was to act as inter-
preter. After several detours, Lestoquoi finally arrived at the town hall in
Breda. There he met the municipal secretary and a member of the civic
guard, Major General (Rtd) J.C. Hardeman. The latter called the com-
mander of the Peel Division, Colonel Schmidt, to Breda. Some time pre-
viously, Schmidt had enquired at General Headquarters as to “how co-
ordination with the French and Belgians had been arranged”. Lieutenant
Colonel J.J.C.P. Wilson replied that there was absolutely no coordination
and left it to the Peel Division “to bring this about”.39 In addition to his
command of the Dutch troops in Noord-Brabant, therefore, Schmidt was
also given a completely new and complex task: to arrange cooperation
with the French troops in Noord-Brabant.
With this in mind, initial talks were held at the town hall in Breda dur-
ing the night of 10 May. They did not bear much fruit. Lestoquoi asked
Schmidt to position his troops to the south of Tilburg, while the French
lieutenant colonel set his own units, the 2nd Reconnaissance Group of the
Ist Corps and the 5th Reconnaissance Group of the 25th Motorised Infantry
Division to defending the Wilhelmina Canal from Tilburg to Oosterhout.
However, on Colonel Schmidt’s return to his command post in Tilburg
at 05.30 hrs, he discovered that Lestoquoi’s request to position the Peel
Division to the south of Tilburg did not fit in with the ideas of the acting
V.E. Nierstrasz, Inleiding en algemeen overzicht van de gevechtsdagen van 10-19 mei
38 ��
��
1940 (The Hague, 1957) 158. Details of the planning and execution of French deployment
in Noord-Brabant can be found in B. Chaix, Conception et déroulement de l’intervention des
forces franco-britanniques en Belgique au mois de mai 1940 (unpublished thesis Paris, 1999),
see in particular pp. 405-439, 503-511.
39 ��
Schmidt, “Verslag omtrent de gebeurtenissen van 10 t/m 12 mei 1940”.
��
232 chapter seven
commander of the 2nd Light Armoured Brigade, colonel P.E.A. Dario. The
latter had his brigade, part of the 6th Cuirassier Regiment, of which he was
in fact also commander, and the 4th Motorised Dragoon Regiment take up
positions between Tilburg and Turnhout. It was clear that the Peel Divi-
sion had to face defending the Zuid-Willemsvaart Canal alone.
Schmidt realised that this defence was a fairly hopeless task and he
lost no time in making his way to the Belgian town of Oostmalle, where
général Picard, the commander of 1st Light Armoured Division, was to
be found. On the morning of 11 May, Schmidt urged Picard to move his
troops further east, but he refused. The commander of the Peel Division
subsequently decided to withdraw his troops, at that time positioned to
the south of Beek along the Zuid-Willemsvaart Canal, northwards to be-
hind the Wilhelmina Canal, and by doing so to occupy the ’s-Hertogen-
bosch–Tilburg line using all his troops. On his return to his command
post at Tilburg, however, he discovered that this plan had already been
rendered obsolete by the events of 11 May.
On the evening of 10 May, the Germans had decided to further exploit
the breach of the Peel-Raam Position without delay. The orders issued to
the XXVIth Corps were thus: “XXVIth Corps to continue the assault west-
wards on 11 May. The main aim is to capture as much terrain as possible
westwards!” Generalmajor Alfred Ritter von Hubicki’s 9th Panzer Division
was now also set to work. Across a wide front, the division was to capture
the bridges over the Zuid-Willemsvaart Canal and to push on and occu-
py the area around Roosendaal. “The division is to link up with Student’s
para units landed near Moerdijk and to defend against a possible attack
from Antwerp.”40 As the IXth Corps, part of the 6th Army, of which the 30th
and the 56th Infantry Divisions were deployed in the front line, decided to
push forward, the Dutch defenders behind the Zuid-Willemsvaart Canal
were attacked along virtually the entire length of the canal.
The reconnaissance battalion of the 254th Infantry Division had been
sent on ahead and it had a clear path, crossing the Zuid-Willemsvaart Ca-
nal via the undefended bridge at Heeswijk. During the course of the after-
noon, at about 13.00 hrs, several Dutch civilians raised the alarm and re-
ported the advance of these German troops to the nearest Dutch soldiers,
who were stationed along the canal north of Middelrode near Den Dun-
gen and who formed part of the IIIrd battalion of the 14th Infantry Regi-
40 ��
Generalkommando
��
XXVI, A.K., Ia/op nr. 1, “Korpsbefehl für die Fortsetzung des
Angriffs am 11.5.40”, 10 May 1940, in: Feldzug in Holland u. Belgien 10.5.-1.6.1940, Gen.
Kdo. XXVI A.K., Anl.z.K.T.B. 9.5.-1.6.1940, in: DC-NIMH, Collectie Washington Docu-
menten, no. 178/7.
An antitank gun in a camouflaged position on the outskirts of ’s‑Hertogenbosch,
near the Zuid-Willemsvaart Canal, 10 May 1940, at around 10.00 hrs. On the verge of
the road is a light machine gun. On the far right in the background, on the other side
of the road, behind the barrier, is a second antitank gun.
The same antitank gun, but this time the photo is taken looking down range. The crew are
scanning the skies for German aircraft.
234 chapter seven
ment. This report caused some panic among the battalion’s 2nd company
or, as company commander Reserve Lieutenant L.C.A. van Kuyk later re-
called: “This report created a highly nervous mood among us as (...) it was
possible that the enemy would attack from the rear.”41 Van Kuyk decided
to completely abandon his position. This flight, in which Van Kuyk’s com-
pany decided to follow its commander, was noticed, however, by Reserve
Captain G. Wissels, commander of the 3rd company of III-14 RI. He shout-
ed to Van Kuyk asking “how he had received the order to retreat. Hearsay!
With difficulty I got the battalion back into position”.42 Nerves were taut;
the reconnaissance battalion initially ignored the Dutch battalion, focused
as it was on the area around Breda. It was only on the early morning of 12
May that a motorcycle patrol commanded by an NCO headed towards the
Dutch units at Den Dungen. This patrol was stopped, however, costing
the lives of three Germans and resulting in the capture of six soldiers. This
was the signal for the German troops to launch a powerful attack. Battal-
ion commander Reserve Major E.G. Döbken organised the defence. “He
gave us courage and said that the men did not look that evil”, one soldier
remembered. Döbken was killed shortly afterwards: “Then something ter-
rible happened. The Major saw a gun which he wanted to destroy, but he
died bravely like a real warrior at the head [of his troops].”43 This meant
the end of the IIIrd battalion of the 14th Infantry Regiment: small groups
fled westwards in a disorderly fashion, away from the scene of battle.
To the south of Heeswijk, the 5th Company of the 481st Infantry Regi-
ment encountered few difficulties in reaching the Zuid-Willemsvaart Ca-
nal. “The enemy was quickly defeated, insofar as there was opposition at
all, the roadblocks, at which the Dutch are masters, were removed.”44
Veghel was occupied and at 09.30 hrs the first patrols reconnoitred
the canal bank. The Dutch troops here were determined to hold their
ground, in particular because the commander of the Peel Division, Colo-
nel Schmidt, had issued the following order: “The task is to hold your
positions, with a view to giving the advancing French army a chance to
deploy.”45 The allies were on their way! The tide seemed to be turning!
When the first German armoured vehicles appeared on the canal bank
at Veghel, the Dutch troops (the IInd battalion of the 2nd Infantry Regiment
41 ��
2-III-14
��
R.I., “Gevechtsbericht tijdvak 10 t/m 15 mei 1940”, in: DC-NIMH, 521/84.
42 ��
3-III-14
��
R.I., “Gevechtsbericht 10/15 mei 1940”, in: DC-NIMH, Strijd Nederlands
43 ��
Letter
��
by A.A. Buijs to J. Cappon, 19 May 1941, in: DC-NIMH, Strijd Nederlands
44 ��
256.
��
��Noord-Limburg en Noord-Brabant, 304.
45 ��
Nierstrasz,
An antitank gun of the 3rd squadron of Hussars, at Rosmalen on the road from Grave to
’s‑Hertogenbosch during an alert drill, late April 1940.
The German advance through the streets of Veghel, 12 May 1940.

236 chapter seven
and the IInd battalion of the 17th Infantry Regiment) confidently opened
fire. Their 6-Veld field guns destroyed a few German armoured vehicles,
while the infantry hindered every attempt to cross the Zuid-Willemsvaart
Canal. Reserve Captain V. de Kruijff, company commander of 2-II-2 RI,
later remembered:
At about 11.00 hrs there was a vigorous attack in which the enemy deployed
more machine guns and several armoured vehicles. This attack was repelled
with unabated courage and determination and the enemy was unable to si-
lence our weapons, on the contrary this attack was also rebuffed.46
Nonetheless, in the end, the Dutch troops at Veghel had to surrender as

the 456th Infantry Regiment succeeded in crossing the Zuid-Willemsvaart
Canal at Erp, to the south of Veghel. The Ist battalion of the 13th Infantry
Regiment, which was defending Erp, was overawed by the German ac-
tions and in the afternoon the first units began to retreat at their own ini-
tiative. This withdrawal turned into a wild flight.
Then suddenly an order from the left flank: withdraw. Request to command-
er of the 2nd Section (...) to establish contact with Company Commander
and to ask whether this order is correct. No contact can be made with CC.
Suddenly diagonally to my left and rear I see two enemy soldiers lying next
to each other. I order two marksmen to shoot, receive machine-gun fire in
return. Has the 1st Company withdrawn? What is that? First section is re-
treating south-easterly or along the canal. What is going on? The men re-
port: the 1st Company retreated a while ago. Enemy has crossed the canal in
rubber dinghies. (...) situation is now becoming serious. I see, as a result of
the open terrain to the rear, other sections withdrawing. Decide to withdraw
also....47
Eventually the 481st Infantry Regiment, thanks to the breach at Erp effect-
ed by the 456th Infantry Regiment, reached St Oedenrode on the evening
of 11 May. “The crossing of the second larger waterway, the Zuid-Willems-
vaart Canal, was achieved without large losses.”48
Along the southern section of the Zuid-Willemsvaart Canal there was
hardly any heavy fighting. The attack by the 56th Infantry Division in the
area between Helmond and Someren quickly led to the Dutch defenders
giving ground. In the evening, the German division reached Eindhoven and
Valkenswaard. The Germans had certainly not expected such success: “For
46 ��
��
V. de Kruijff, “Verslag van de gevechtshandelingen gedurende de oorlogsdagen”, 10
March 1941, in: DC-NIMH, Strijd Nederlandse Grondgebied, box 524, file 26.
47 ��
��
W. Haan, “Gevecht afd. ��
Zuid-Willemsvaart door de 3e Sectie van 3-I-13 R.I.”, in:
48 ��
256.
��
German infantry at Breda on 14 May 1940.
the division, 11 May has run an unexpected course. No-one had expected
the Dutch to surrender the strong position in the Peel area without a fight.”49
There was now almost nothing left of the Peel Division. Many Dutch sol-
diers had fled westwards in disarray. It was
(…) a wild flight of our retreating troops (...) There was a mix of the many
combat troops and support units which formed the Peel Division, which was
unavoidable in a withdrawal at such speed and under such circumstances.50
All this greatly amazed the French troops, who had expected to witness a
strong Dutch defence by the IIIrd Corps and the Light Division in Noord-
Brabant. The Dutch troops were referred to by the French as “the dirty
northern Boche, the traitors”.51 Colonel Schmidt did not lose heart, how-
ever. During the course of the afternoon of 11 May, he decided to with-
draw his division to the Tilburg–’s-Hertogenbosch line. Communications
between his battalions proved to have been severed, however, and this or-
der was not carried out.
49 ��
56.
��
Inf. Division, Ia, Kriegstagebuch Nr. 3, Teil I.
50 ��
��
Assistant chaplain M.A. Vos, “Verslag”, in: DC-NIMH, Strijd Nederlands Grondge-
bied, box 526, file 1.
Testimony of L.J. Schmidt, 1 July 1948, in: Enquêtecommissie Regeringsbeleid. Deel
51 ��
��
Ic, 523.
A German column along the Wilhelmina Canal at Tilburg.
Dutch soldiers from Noord-Brabant, having reached the comparative safety of Caen,
France, 20 May 1940.
With a view to regrouping the retreating Dutch troops, Colonel

Schmidt then decided to move his command post to Princenhage near
Breda. He sent his staff on ahead. When Schmidt arrived at his new com-
mand post, however, it turned out to be deserted. “A police corporal re-
ported that the officers had gone to Roosendaal, but not a single officer
had remained to pass on intelligence.” The Peel Division commander
therefore decided to return to Tilburg. It was already starting to get light
and in view of the presence of German aircraft, Schmidt drove at full
speed and consequently missed a turning. In spite of this, he decided to
continue in the same direction. Some time later, near Loon op Zand, he
was taken by surprise by the advance party of the 9th Panzer Division.
Coming round a bend I found myself in front of the 9th Panzer Division,
which had breached the line. I expressed my joy at finally seeing French ar-
moured vehicles, but they turned out to be Germans, who then took us pris-
oner.52
Following in the footsteps of most of the Peel Division, its commander

was now also out of action. The French commander-in-chief, général M.
Gamelin, had by this time decided, due to the advance of the German
army on the Maastricht–Tongeren axis, to deploy his 7th Army no further
than Breda. Its task now consisted of protecting Antwerp and preventing
the Germans from occupying the Zeeland islands. “Do not initiate com-
bat beyond Breda”, he signalled to the commander of the 7th Army, général
Giraud.53 As a result, the Ist Corps did not advance further than the small
river Mark. The 38th Infantry Regiment of the 25th Motorised Infantry Di-
vision took up position between Terheijden and Ulvenhout and, to the
south, the 121st Infantry Regiment of the same division positioned itself
in the area up to Hoogstraten in Belgium. To the north, the Ist Corps was
protected by the Groupement de Beauchesne. To the south of Tilburg there
was also the 2nd Light Armoured Brigade of the 1st Light Armoured Divi-
sion, which, however, withdrew to the south-east.54 All this meant that the
road to the Moerdijk bridges lay wide open for the 9th Panzer Division. Yet
the advance of this division did not progress entirely smoothly. The many
obstacles set by Dutch troops slowed their progress, while the Germans
also had to deal with serious traffic congestion. In spite of this, the first
light armoured vehicles of the 9th Panzer Division’s reconnaissance section
succeeded in reaching the Moerdijk bridges at 16.45 hrs on 12 May. The
Korpsbefehl of the XXVIth Corps for 13 May reported with satisfaction:
52 ��
Schmidt, “Verslag omtrent de gebeurtenissen van 10 t/m 12 mei 1940”.
��
See M. Lerecouvreux, L’ Armée Giraud en Hollande 1939-1940 (Paris, 1951).
53 ��
��
Nierstrasz, Inleiding en algemeen overzicht, 166-168.
54 ��
��
240 chapter seven
Communications with the 7th Air Division re-established near Moerdijk. As

a result orders have largely been fulfilled. I express my great admiration at
the achievements of all officers and troops over the past few days!55
The defence by the Peel Division of the Zuid-Willemsvaart Canal had col-
lapsed within a single day. This was no great surprise: the positions could
not be defended and German superiority was overwhelming. Once the
retreat of the Dutch troops had got underway, the Peel Division in effect
ceased to exist. Troop units withdrew in a disorderly fashion towards the
west, while division commander Colonel Schmidt, who was given the
impossible task by General Headquarters both of leading his own troops
and consulting with the French on the action to be taken, was captured.
The only organised opposition against the German advance could now be
expected in western Brabant from sections of the French 7th Army, spe-
cifically the Ist Corps. This corps did not, however, proceed further than
the area around Breda due to the German advance on the Maastricht–
Tongeren axis.
Zeeland struggles on
For the troops in the province of Zeeland, the Germans were now frighten-
ingly close. The Dutch units here came under the Commander in Zeeland,
Rear Admiral H.J. van der Stad, who in turn reported directly to the com-
mander-in-chief, General Winkelman. The orders which Van der Stad had
received before the German invasion were that as long as the Netherlands
was not at war he had to ensure that Dutch neutrality was not breached,
and in the event of an enemy attack he had to defend Zeeuws-Vlaanderen
and the Zeeland islands as strongly as possible. This had been ordered by
General Winkelman so as to keep the port of Antwerp open for allied use.
The main effort of the defence was to be located on the islands of Zuid-
Beveland and Walcheren. This area was protected by two positions: the
Bath Position and the Zanddijk Position, whereby the former acted as an
outpost position for the Zanddijk Position, which was located between
Hansweert and Yerseke.
The Bath Position was near the former Bath fort and comprised twelve
casemates, a tank ditch and some inundated terrain. The 14th Border Bat-
55 ��
Generalkommando
��
XXVI. A.K., Ia/op Nr. 2, “Korpsbefehl für die Fortsetzung des
Angriffs am 13.5.40.”, 12 May 1940, in: Feldzug in Holland u. Belgien 10.5.-1.6.1940. Gen.
Kdo. XXVI A.K., Anl.z.K.T.B. 9.5.-1.6.1940, in: DC-NIMH, Collectie Washington Docu-
menten, no. 178/7.
XXVI. and XXXIX. Armeekorps from 13 May 1940

XXXX
18
XXX XXX
26 39
XX
XXX XX XX
SSV (-)
9 254 SSAH
SSG XX XX
22 7
SSD
XX
256
225
208
talion was stationed here, commanded by Major F.G. Triebel, who in turn
reported to the regiment commander of the 38th Infantry Regiment, Re-
serve Lieutenant Colonel J.H.W. Bruins. Although the Bath Position only
had an outpost function, the 14th Border Battalion had still been given or-
ders to stand its ground. Any retreat to the Zanddijk Position would only
be allowed on the orders of the Commander in Zeeland or the command-
er of the 38th Infantry Regiment.
The Zanddijk Position formed the main defence for Zuid-Beveland
and thus also for Walcheren. It was to be defended to the last and owed
its strength to the inundated polders in front of the position. This meant
that the only access to the position was via five dykes. These access roads
were more heavily defended; the one over the Tholseindsche Dyke even
had its own outpost at Kaasgat, with machine guns, a 6-Veld field gun and
an antitank gun. The Zanddijk Position was divided into three sectors,
which were each manned by one battalion. The northernmost sector was
defended by the IIIrd battalion of the 38th Infantry Regiment led by Major
U.C.C. Noordenbos, the central sector by III-40 RI led by Reserve Major
H.F.L. Krämer and the southern sector by I-40 RI under Reserve Captain
A. de Wit. The position was reinforced by part of the 17th Artillery Regi-
242 chapter seven
French command structure in western Brabant and Zeeland May 1940
XXXX
Nord
7 Fr Fr
XX XXX XXX
1 1 16
X XX
1 XX
9
Beauchesne 25 XX
4
4
XX
18 38
Lestoquoi 92
X 121 68
18
2
16
216
6 224
225
341
XX
4
60 89
289
74
241 59
270
271
50
command structure on 10 May 68

XX
command structure from 13 May
21
ment, by a mortar company and some anti-aircraft artillery. Command

of the entire Zanddijk Position was held by the commander of the 40th
Infantry Regiment, Reserve Lieutenant Colonel P.L.R. van der Drift. In-
cidentally, on 10 May 1940, Rear Admiral Van der Stad decided not to
command the defence of the Zanddijk Position personally as he wished to
contact the commander of the incoming French troops in Middelburg. He
therefore decided to delegate tactical command of all the Dutch troops in
Zuid-Beveland to Reserve Lieutenant Colonel Bruins, commander of the
38th Infantry Regiment, a decision with which the latter was not altogether
happy as he had not been involved in preparations for defending the lines
in this area until 10 May.
The remaining Zeeland islands were hardly defended at all. There were,
however, detachments from the Ist battalion of the 38th Infantry Regiment
stationed at a few tactically important positions on Tholen. This battalion
was given the task of defending the flanks of the Zanddijk Position. On
Schouwen-Duiveland, Haamstede airfield was protected by a company

of surveillance troops and an anti-aircraft battery. Finally, stationed in
Zeeuws-Vlaanderen were, in particular, the IInd battalions of the 38th and
the 40th Infantry Regiments, respectively, and the 14th and the 38th Reserve
Border Companies.
The French unit which set out in the direction of Zeeland following the
morning of 10 May comprised the 60th Infantry Division commanded by
général de brigade Marcel Deslaurens and the 68th Infantry Division led
by général de division M.F.G. Beaufrère. The latter division, which did not
belong to the 7th Army, came directly under the Commandant en chef des
forces maritimes du Nord, amiral Jean-Charles Abrial. The division de-
tachment destined for Walcheren was comprised largely of the 224th In-
fantry Regiment, commanded by général de brigade Durand, the infantry
commander of the 68th Infantry Division. Upon arrival on Walcheren, this
detachment came under the Ist Corps.
On the early morning of 11 May, général Durand arrived at Rear Ad-
miral Van der Stad’s command post. The French commander was unim-
pressed by the Dutch troops. Van der Stad later declared:
General Durand complained about the limited strength of my troops, in
particular the lack of sufficient artillery and anti-aircraft batteries; he also
explained that he had received orders to defend the islands to the last and
he would do so, yet I gained the strong impression that his greatest concern
was to ensure that his retreat route was secure.56
Durand and Van der Stad could not agree on a common defence concept.
The French general thought the location of the Zanddijk Position to be
tactically incorrect and doubted the value of the inundation areas. He
also wondered whether the Germans would attack via the Kreekrak Dam
which was defended by the Bath Position. He thought it much more likely
that an attack on the coast of Zuid-Beveland would be launched out of
Tholen using motorboats. Durand therefore positioned his detachment
between Middelburg and Flushing and along the northern coast of Zuid-
Beveland to the north of Goes. With a view to creating a unified com-
mand, on 13 May the Dutch troops which came under Reserve Lieutenant
Colonel Bruins were placed under the command of général Durand, while
the entire 68th Infantry Division was placed under the commander of the
Ist Corps.57
56 ��
H.J.
��
van der Stad, “Verslag over de gebeurtenissen na het uitbreken van den oorlog”,
C.D. Kamerling, De strijd in Zeeland. Mei 1940 (The Hague, 1954) 16-17 and 19.
57 ��
��
244 chapter seven
The reports received from Noord-Brabant from 12 May onwards served to

increase unease among the troops in Zeeland. First of all, sections of the
dispersed Peel Division arrived in Zeeland.
It was a motley group: on bicycles, on trucks, on foot, ammunition vehicles,
officers without troops and men without officers, some armed, some not (...)
According to Lieutenant Colonel Themann, who reported to me in a highly
stressed state, they had ‘fought like lions’, no-one had been injured, however;
they all gave the impression of being troops who had fled rather than been
beaten: rosy-cheeked and in good health, laughing, noisy, joking with the
girls and not pale, broken, dejected and exhausted.58
58 ��
��
Van der Stad, “Verslag over de gebeurtenissen na het uitbreken van den oorlog”.
Lieutenant Colonel G.E.A. Themann was commander of the 30th Infantry Regiment.
The reports of the German troops’ advance were also unsettling. The 9th
Panzer Division advanced in the early hours of 11 May in two columns,
a northern column led by Oberst Wilhelm von Apell and a southern one
led by Oberstleutnant Hans Graf von Sponeck. To the rear of the 9th Panzer
Division, one day later, SS regiment ‘Adolf Hitler’ of the Xth Corps contin-
ued to advance via Kleef and Langstraat. Its units fought against Dutch
troops on the bridge at Keizersveer, who then retreated and blew up the
bridge. On 12 May, to the south of the 9th Panzer Division, the SS Ver-
fügungsdivision and the 6th Army’s 56th Infantry Division headed west-
wards. There were, however, no large-scale battles fought between French
and German troops in Noord-Brabant. The Belgian army had decided
to withdraw to the Dyle Position, which ran from Antwerp via Louvain
to Malines. As a consequence, the French 7th Army, inasmuch as it was
present in Noord-Brabant, was at risk of becoming cut off from the rest
of the French army. At 13.35 hrs on 12 May, général d’armée Giraud was
therefore issued with the following order: “Take any measures necessary
to deploy your full force in combat on the Antwerp-Namur line.”59 This
meant that the 7th Army was to withdraw entirely to the west of the river
Scheldt. In western Noord-Brabant, there was therefore only some rear-
guard action. On 13 May, the XXVIth Corps had the area around Breda
under control.
Now what? In the Angriffsbefehl issued to the XXVIth Corps on 10 May,
the answer to the question of what was to happen once they had reached
the area around Breda had been left wide open. Yet, as described in Chap-
ter 5, the Oberbefehlshaber des Heeres, Generaloberst von Brauchitsch, and
the commander of Army Group B, Generaloberst von Bock, had taken
measures in this respect on 11, 12 and 13 May. On 13 May the command-
er-in-chief of the 18th Army, General der Artillerie G.K.F.W. von Küchler,
could consequently form a new corps for the attack on Rotterdam, the
XXXIXth, which included the 9th Panzer Division, SS regiment ‘Adolf Hit-
ler’ and the 254th Infantry Division from the XXVIth Corps. The remainder
of the XXVIth Corps was ordered to protect the southern flank of the 18th
Army against Antwerp “and to do so occupy the area between Breda and
the mouth of the Scheldt on 14 May”.60
As a result of the latter order, the SS Verfügungsdivision led by SS Grup-
penführer Haußer and headed by SS regiment ‘Deutschland’ set out in the
early hours of 14 May via Esschen to Hoogerheide. Woensdrecht was sub-
��Inleiding en algemeen overzicht, 168.

59 ��
Nierstrasz,
60 ��
Armeeoberkommando
��
18, Abt. Ia, “Armeebefehl für den Angriff auf die Festung
Holland”, 13 May 1940, in: Nierstrasz, Inleiding en algemeen overzicht, 300-301.
SS-Gruppenführer Paul Haußer.
Dutch command structure in Zeeland mei 1940
XX Commander in
Zeeland (CZ)
68 Fr
38 (-) 2 40 1 17 (-)
40 2
2 38(-) 1
23
1 (-) 1 4
3
14
3 3 1 2/38
38
14 3 38 3 1/38
17 (-)
3 command structure up to 10 May 1940

command structure after 10 May 1940
command structure from 13 May 1940
sequently occupied without a fight at 10.40 hrs. This resulted in the isth-
mus of Zuid-Beveland being cut off and some French troops at Bergen op
Zoom, the 12th Division Reconnaissance Group, led by chef d’escadron G.
Michon, being surrounded.61 The 256th Infantry Division and SS regiment
‘Germania’ led the advance on Antwerp, while between 15.00 and 16.00
hrs the first patrols of SS regiment ‘Deutschland’ reconnoitred the forward
area of the Bath Position.
Major Triebel, commander of the 14th Border Battalion which manned
the Bath Position, subsequently sent for the three company command-
ers to come to his command post in Rilland. Shortly after they arrived,
at 18.00 hrs, German shelling started. Triebel ordered his company com-
manders to return immediately to their units in order to rebuff any attack.
However, only Reserve Lieutenant J.C. van Breda, commander of the 1st
company, followed this order: the other two commanders, Reserve Cap-
tain C.H. Mulder (2-14th Border Battalion) and Captain R. Helmer (3-14th
Border Battalion), preferred to remain safely in Rilland. Major Triebel had
to repeat his order forcefully before the two captains were prepared to re-
turn to their men. In fact, they both went to the southern sector of the
trench where the company of Reserve Captain Mulder was to be found, so
that Captain Helmer was still not with his troops, which in the meantime
had come under the heaviest shelling. Once Triebel had been informed of
this, Reserve Captain Mulder “was absolutely ordered to stand his ground
and to do everything in his power to calm the men. He was also told to
order Captain Helmer on his behalf to return to his command post”62.
In the end, Helmer did return to his own command post, but he discov-
ered that his men were in the process of fleeing the trench due to the force
of the enemy fire. Helmer did nothing to stop them, but again returned
to Bath harbour, to the command post of Reserve Captain Mulder. There
the two captains decided to flee, taking a large part of the 2nd Company
of the 14th Border Battalion with them. This meant that the Bath Position,
which had not actually been subjected to an actual assault, was now only
manned by small groups, chiefly the 1st Company of Reserve Lieutenant
Van Breda. These troops would of course not be able to withstand a large-
scale German attack and, once Major Triebel had informed his command-
er, Reserve Lieutenant Colonel Bruins, of the situation, he was given or-
ders at 20.00 hrs to evacuate the Bath Position. The withdrawal could not
61 ��
“Rapport
��
du Chef d’Escadron Michon sur les opérations de Hollande, du 10 au 15
mai et sur les circonstances de sa capture”, August 1940, in: DC-NIMH, Strijd Nederlands
62 ��
F.G.
��
Triebel, “Rapport krijgsverrichtingen”, 29 June 1940, in: DC-NIMH, Strijd
Nederlands Grondgebied, box 465, file 19.
248 chapter seven
be described as orderly: Triebel gave no specific instructions and the men

retreated westwards without any cohesion. The Bath Position had therefore
‘fallen’ without an actual ground assault having taken place. Particularly
weak commanders had not been able to command their troops and had,
partially at their own initiative, withdrawn together with their troops.
This naturally had a demoralising effect on the men at the Zanddijk Posi-
tion. This was added to the devastating news that the Dutch army had ca-
pitulated but that the troops in Zeeland were to fight on. “The proclama-
tion greatly affected the men, many wept from anger and regret, others (and
they were not the lowest in rank) asked why we had to continue fighting
when the game was apparently already lost.” Reserve Lieutenant Colonel
Bruins, the commander of the Dutch troops on Zuid-Beveland, succeeded
in calming their emotions. The Dutch troops would continue to fight.63
They were supported in this by fresh French reinforcements. During the
night of 13 May, a detachment from the 60th Infantry Division commanded
by colonel Guihard had arrived on Zuid-Beveland. This detachment com-
prised the 68th Division Reconnaissance Group, the 27th Infantry Regiment
and two battalions of the 307th Artillery Regiment. This detachment did
not, however, take up positions in the Zanddijk Position, but along the
Zuid-Beveland Canal and on the bank of the Oosterschelde, much to the
displeasure of Reserve Lieutenant Colonel Bruins. He was told by a French
lieutenant colonel how simple it would be to impede a canal crossing by
means of “diagonal and flanking fire with rifles and machine guns”, but
personally thought that “if no further measures were taken by the French
command, their defence of the canal would lead to panic”64.
The French reinforcements meant that new chains of command were
needed. With a view to achieving this, général Beaufrère went to Mid-
delburg on 15 May. He was not particularly impressed by the actions of
général Durand, whom he accused of defeatism as he had made no prepa-
rations for defence of the Zuid-Beveland Canal. Durand was relieved of
his command of the troops on Zuid-Beveland. It was decided that, as of
16 May, général de brigade Deslaurens would command all the land forces
on Zuid-Beveland and Walcheren, that contre-amiral C.J.G. Platon (who
was in Zeeland with a view to organising sea transport) would take com-
mand of the navy and air forces, and that général Beaufrère would com-
mand the troops charged with defending the coast of Zeeuws-Vlaanderen.
63 ��
J.H.W.
��
Bruins, “Rapport aan den Opperbevelhebber der troepen in Zeeland over de
gebeurtenissen op Zuid-Beveland en te Bergen op Zoom van 10 mei 1940 tot en met 25 mei
1940”, July 1940, in: DC-NIMH, Strijd Nederlands Grondgebied, box 465, file 1.
64 �Ibidem.
Soldiers of SS regiment ‘Deutschland’ in front of the Zanddijk Position,
on the Tholseindsche Dyke.
SS regiment ‘Deutschland’ under fire on the east bank of the Zuid-Beveland Canal,
15 May 1940.
250 chapter seven
Colonel Guihard and général Durand now operated under the command
of général Deslaurens, as commanders of the troops on Zuid-Beveland
and on Walcheren, respectively.65
On the morning of 15 May, the German attack on Zuid-Beveland and
Walcheren commenced. One attack unit, which consisted chiefly of SS
regiment ‘Deutschland’ led by SS Standartenführer Felix Steiner, was or-
dered to push through via Goes to Middelburg.66 The Germans were able
to advance through the Bath Position unimpeded, resulting in the ad-
vance party of the SS regiment reaching the Tholseindsche Dyke in the
inundated section of the Zanddijk Line as early as 08.00 hrs. The Dutch
troops on this dyke responded particularly quickly: the commander of the
38th Mortar Company, Reserve Captain H. de Groot, immediately gave or-
ders to open fire,
(…) to which the enemy responded immediately. Our fire prevented the
enemy from approaching. The machine-gun fire from Kaasgat and the fire
from the antitank gun were immediately supported by mortar fire, even be-
fore I had had any opportunity to order it.67
In the meantime, the Luftwaffe had arrived on the scene and started to
bomb the Zanddijk Position heavily, resulting in the death of Sergeant
A.N. Westdijk, commander of the light machine-gun group at Kaasgat. In
spite of this, the Dutch were able to halt the German advance here.
Even in the light of this success, however, the morale of the men in the
Zanddijk Line to the rear of Kaasgat had deteriorated drastically, partly due
to the impression made by the German aircraft. In the sector manned by the
1st company of III-38 RI, most soldiers fled totally demoralised and in panic
towards the Zuid-Beveland Canal. The company commander of I-III-38 RI,
Reserve Lieutenant P.F. Goossens, who had sought cover, observed:
When the bombing eased, the sergeant-assistant to the commander report-
ed (...) that the shelters had been abandoned and that the position of III-40
RI near the railway had also been abandoned. Company Commander went
to left section and saw from a distance that this section’s personnel were
speeding away on bicycles.68
��Zeeland, 19.
65 ��
Kamerling,
66 � Standartenführer is equal in rank to Oberst. For a full list of rank equivalents, see
Annex.
67 ��
��
Report by Commander of the 38th Mortar Company chiefly relating to the major
events on Tuesday 14 and Wednesday 15 May 1940, in: DC-NIMH, Strijd Nederlands
68 ��
Statement by Reserve Lieutenant P.F. Goossens, in: DC-NIMH, Strijd Nederlands
��
At about 11.20 hrs, Major Noordenbos, commander of III-38 RI, ordered

all units to withdraw to Wemeldinge, behind the Zuid-Beveland Canal.
By doing so, Noordenbos let down the men at Kaasgat. Reserve Cap-
tain H. de Groot was amazed to see what was happening in the area to his
rear. “The orderly sent to Mortar Section at the Zanddijk returned and
reported that there was no-one there, which left us all with a horrible feel-
ing.” Although the soldiers at Kaasgat had repelled a German attack, they
were forced to retreat, following the men from the northern sector of the
Zanddijk Position who were retreating in chaos.69
Things were not going much better in the central sector of the Zanddijk
Position. The troops there became demoralised when they realised that
much of the IIIrd battalion of the 38th Infantry Regiment had withdrawn
“while shouting loudly: ‘The Dutch people will fight no more, then we will
not fight either’”. The commander of the IIIrd battalion of the 40th Infantry
Regiment, Reserve Major H.F.L. Krämer, stationed in the central section,
attempted to maintain calm, but in vain:
(…) the enormously deep dejection and shock at the capitulation of the
Netherlands, the departure of the country’s government, no longer being
able or wanting to comprehend the point of fighting on and the heavy air
raids had apparently put people into such a state that all ability or reason to
fight was lost.70
Between 12.15 and 14.00 hrs, the troops from the central sector of the
Zanddijk Position withdrew to behind the Zuid-Beveland Canal.
The first SS troops of Gruppe-Steiner appeared in front of the southern
sector of the Zanddijk Position at about 10.00 hrs. They advanced par-
ticularly cautiously, severely impeded by artillery fire from the IInd battal-
ion of the 17th Artillery Regiment and fire from the French torpedo boat
l’Incomprise. Reports of the withdrawal of the IIIrd battalion of the 40th In-
fantry Regiment were not encouraging for the commander of the Ist bat-
talion of the 40th Infantry Regiment which was stationed in the southern
sector. When some time later he witnessed two groups from his own bat-
talion retreating near the Hansweert sluices, under the pretence of being
shot at by French artillery, he realised that the morale of many of the sol-
diers left a lot to be desired. At 14.00 hrs, following consultation with Re-
serve Lieutenant Colonel Van der Drift, he ordered his battalion to with-
draw to behind the Zuid-Beveland Canal. Following the Bath Position,
69 ��
��
Report by Commander of the 38th Mortar Company in: DC-NIMH, Strijd Neder-
70 ��
H.F.L.
��
Krämer, “Verslag betreffende de oorlogshandelingen van III-40 R.I. vanaf 10
mei 1940”, 24 June 1940, in: DC-NIMH, Strijd Nederlands Grondgebied, box 464, file 14.
252 chapter seven
the easily defendable Zanddijk Position had now also been abandoned
by Dutch troops, without an actual German assault having been carried
out. Largely uninspiring Dutch officers had not succeeded in getting the
soldiers, who had become thoroughly demoralised by the capitulation of
the rest of the Netherlands, to act. This resulted in a chaotic flight, during
which many weapons were discarded.
The final pocket of resistance eradicated
While all this was going on, the French 271st Infantry Regiment had dug
itself in to the best of its ability on the western dyke of the Zuid-Beve-
land Canal.71 However, the position was weak and shallow. To the rear,
the Dutch battalions regrouped: III-38 RI around Kapelle, I-40 RI near
Hoedekenskerke and III-40 RI at Baarland. The point of main effort of the
German attack on the French positions was along the Yerseke–Kapelle
road: deployed to the north was the Ist battalion of SS regiment ‘Deutsch-
land’ commanded by Obersturmbannführer72 Witt, to the south the IIIrd
battalion led by Obersturmbannführer Matthias Kleinheisterkamp. Fol-
lowing a bombing raid by the Luftwaffe, the first German troops crossed
the canal, which resulted in widespread panic among the French troops.
The situation quickly proved to be untenable and at 11.00 hrs the order
came that all French units were to withdraw to Walcheren. This enabled
the Germans to make a rapid advance: at 16.00 hrs Goes was captured and
a large number of French troops were taken prisoner. “Enemy resistance
is waning and has almost disappeared”, as was recorded with satisfaction
in the SS Verfügingsdivision’s Kriegstagebuch.73
Colonel Guihard, the commander of the troops on Zuid-Beveland, had
by this time removed to the Sloe Dam and formed a small bridgehead to
the east of the dam. The remaining French troops and a few Dutch units
entered Walcheren across the Sloe Dam via this bridgehead. A German
attack on the 40-metre wide and 800-metre long dam would have been
difficult to repel and général Deslaurens, commander of all the troops on
Walcheren and Zuid-Beveland, viewed the situation rather optimistically:
“Situation excellent; no need for Dutch reinforcements. Everything going
71 ��
With
��
the exception of one battalion stationed on the north coast of Zuid-Beveland.
72 � Obersturmbannführer is equal in rank to Oberstleutnant. For a full list of rank
equivalents, see Annex.
73 ��
��
Kriegstagebuch der SS-V-Division. ��
Westfeldzug 1940: 1.5.-14-7.1940, in: DC-
As the bridge over the Zuid-Beveland Canal had been destroyed, SS regiment ‘Deutschland’
crossed using rubber dinghies.
very well.”74 Général Deslaurens had at his disposal the majority of the 224th
Infantry Regiment, the Ist battalion of the 89th Artillery Regiment and sev-
eral Dutch units for defending Walcheren. These were able to successfully
repel a German attack on the Sloe Dam on the evening of 16 May.
The battalion encounters strong opposition from enemy on the dam and has
come to a halt there. Its intention of the whole battle group advancing on
Walcheren and commencing the attack during the night cannot be carried
out.75
At the headquarters of the XXVIth Corps, General Wodrig was becoming

impatient. On 16 May, he ordered that the SS Verfügungsdivision should
be “in possession of the island of Walcheren as quickly as possible. […]
The main focus must now be to carry out this order quickly!”76 The islands
of Tholen and Schouwen-Duiveland were also to be fully captured by the
Germans. With respect to the former island, Wodrig’s order was superflu-
ous. On the afternoon of 16 May, following an artillery attack on the town
of Tholen, parts of the 15th Machine-gun Battalion led by Oberst Richard
��Zeeland, 116.
74 ��
Kamerling,
75 ��
Kriegstagebuch
��
der SS-V-Division.
76 ��
��
Generalkommando XXVI. A.K., Ia/op Nr. 6, “Korpsbefehl für den 17.5.40.”, 16 May
1940, in: Feldzug in Holland u. Belgien 10.5.-l.6.1940. Gen.Kdo. XXVI A.K., Anl.z.K.T.B.
9.5.-1.6.1940, in: DC-NIMH, Collectie Washington Documenten, no. 178/7.
254 chapter seven
Wirtz had already crossed the Eendracht waterway (a day earlier, Dutch
troops had succeeded in repelling an attack) and had reached Stave-
nisse at about 16.30 hrs. At 02.30 hrs on 17 May, Gruppe-Wirtz crossed
to Schouwen-Duiveland. The only fighting was conducted on the streets
of Zierikzee. Elsewhere on the island, the Dutch surrendered without
putting up a fight. By 07.00 hrs, the entire island was in German hands.
The Germans were to experience greater difficulty in capturing Wal-
cheren. However, they were not impeded by the remaining Dutch troops
on Zuid-Beveland, even though a retired Royal Netherlands East Indies
Army officer, Lieutenant Colonel A.R.W. Gey van Pittius, the Dutch Red
Cross delegate to the Zeeland Command, did everything in his power to
deploy the remainder of the 38th and the 40th Infantry Regiment stationed
near Borssele against the Germans. To this end, on 16 May Rear Admiral
Van der Stad appointed the retired officer commander of all the troops on
Zuid-Beveland and gave him a declaration which bore the text: “I hereby
authorise Lieutenant Colonel Geij van Pittius to act as he sees fit on Zuid-
Beveland.” Lieutenant Colonels Bruins and Van der Drift, whom he met in
Borssele, resolutely refused to obey him, however, and refused to deploy
their troops. Gey van Pittius then put his Red Cross armband back on and
tried to reach Middelburg to confer with his superiors. Even before he was
able to reach the Sloe Dam, he was stopped by a German officer. The officer
refused to let him through but did allow him to retrace his steps thanks
to his Red Cross armband. Although Gey van Pittius was able to assure
Bruins and Van der Drift on the morning of 17 May, on the basis of his
own eyewitness account, that the SS regiment did not yet control the area
between Goes and the Sloe Dam, and that the Dutch units on Zuid-Beve-
land therefore still had a chance of defending the area to the east of the
Sloe Dam, the two lieutenant colonels continued to refuse to act.77
On 17 May, at about 03.00 hrs, two German artillery battalions started
to shell the western side of the Sloe Dam. Half an hour later, the 9th com-
pany of the IIIrd battalion of SS regiment ‘Deutschland’, commanded by
SS Obersturmführer Rohde, attacked the French. This attack was answered
with heavy artillery fire, however, and failed.
In spite of our own heavy shelling and air support we have not succeeded in
silencing enemy artillery and the accurate firing from the machine guns on
the enemy bank. (...) The companies, in particular the ninth company, must
dig themselves in again on the other bank.78
77 ��
��
Statement by A.R.W. Gey van Pittius, 14 October 1947, in: DC-NIMH, Strijd Ne-
derlands Grondgebied, box 465, file 1.
78 ��
Kriegstagebuch
��
der SS-V-Division.
After this failed attack, the Germans attempted to break opposition in

Walcheren using heavier guns. A devastating artillery attack was launched
on the western extremity of the Sloe Dam and at Arnemuiden, while the
Luftwaffe bombed not only Arnemuiden, but also Flushing and Middel-
burg with high-explosive bombs. This raid had a particularly devastating
effect on the latter town: the resulting fires could not be extinguished and
the historic centre of the town went up in flames. The bombing raids had
in the meantime also had a demoralising effect on the French troops at
the Sloe Dam, even though général Deslaurens repeatedly joined the front
line and tried to boost morale. These soldiers, chiefly reserve personnel
over the age of 30, could only think of their personal safety under such
circumstances. When after 12.00 hrs, the IIIrd battalion of SS regiment
‘Deutschland’ again attempted to cross the Sloe Dam, the troops were so
demoralised that they either remained in their shelters in a daze or tried
to escape in a blind panic. Incidentally, the only Dutch unit near the Sloe
Dam, the 14th Reserve Border Company from Zeeuws-Vlaanderen led by
Reserve Captain C.M. van den Broecke, had already given up as the com-
mander had recognised “the uselessness” of trying to “make a company
with no cohesion whatsoever hold its ground”.79
Consequently, SS regiment ‘Deutschland’ could enter Walcheren almost
completely unimpeded; the only skirmishes were in Arnemuiden. The
suburbs of Flushing were reached at about 20.00 hrs. The Dutch soldiers
of the 38th Infantry Regiment offered no resistance at all here, which en-
dangered the French troops’ crossing into Zeeuws-Vlaanderen. Thanks
to the courageous action of a rearguard under the personal command of
général Deslaurens, however, most of the French were able to reach the
harbour of Breskens in all manner of vessels. Deslaurens fought until the
bitter end: on the evening of 17 May he was fatally wounded by a German
bullet. At 23.00 hrs, Flushing surrendered.80
Over the course of four days, SS regiment ‘Deutschland’ had breached
the Bath Position, the Zanddijk Position, the position along the Zuid-
Beveland Canal and the defences at the Sloe Dam. In doing so, the three
SS battalions defeated ten French and Dutch battalions on Zuid-Beveland
and Walcheren, while a further two Dutch battalions capitulated without
having fought at all. The fall of the weak line along the Zuid-Beveland Ca-
nal could largely be attributed to the demoralising effect of the German air
attacks, and the same could be said of the loss of the Sloe Dam. The actions
79 ��
��
C.M. van den Broecke, “Verslag”, 14 September 1940, in: DC-NIMH, Strijd Neder-
lands Grondgebied, box 464, file 19. Cf.: Kamerling, Zeeland, 117-118.
��Zeeland, 118-129.
80 ��
Kamerling,
256 chapter seven
of the Dutch units can only be described as disappointing. While French

troops fought far from their native country (albeit in their own interests),
général Marcel Deslaurens among those who gave their lives, the poorly
commanded Dutch units surrendered almost without putting up a fight.
The Commander in Zeeland, Rear Admiral Van der Stad, who, follow-
ing the capitulation of General Winkelman, became Commander-in-Chief
of the Land and Sea Forces, had incidentally already removed to Zeeuws-
Vlaanderen at the express request of the Dutch government in London,
which wished to prevent Van der Stad being taken prisoner by the Ger-
mans.81 Also in Zeeuws-Vlaanderen at that time was Prince Bernhard of
the Netherlands, who was briefed on the military situation by the com-
mander of the IInd battalion of the 40th Infantry Regiment, Major H.P. de
Heer, at Oostburg on 17 May. The major advised the prince to leave
Zeeuws-Vlaanderen. “The troops allocated to me were no long combat-
worthy, morale among the remaining small units of II-40 RI and II-38 RI
was deteriorating, while the French viewed us with suspicion.”82 Van der
Stad’s plan to have Dutch troops play a part in the defence of Zeeuws-
Vlaanderen came to nothing. On the contrary: général Beaufrère demanded
on 19 May that all Dutch soldiers remaining in Zeeuws-Vlaanderen should
withdraw, in view of their demoralising effect on the French troops. They
made “them uneasy and nervous, they kept thinking that the Dutch were
Germans, which could lead to fatal errors”.83 Rear Admiral Van der Stad
therefore ordered Major De Heer to move his troops to Ostend. At 21.00
hrs on 19 May, Major De Heer was the last remaining, functioning mem-
ber of the Dutch military to leave the Dutch province of Zeeland.84
Zeeuws-Vlaanderen would also be occupied by German troops. On the

evening of 17 May, the XXVIth Corps shifted its main focus from Walche-
ren to Antwerp. The 256th and 208th Infantry Divisions breached the north-
ern front at Antwerp on both sides of the Breda–Antwerp road and occu-
pied the Belgian port. Next, the IXth Corps, which had originally been part
of the 6th Army, was allocated to the 18th Army and the advance towards
the Canal from Ghent to Terneuzen began, during which the corps also
entered Zeeuws-Vlaanderen. The main focus of the German attack was,
however, to the south of this part of the Netherlands, in the left part of
81 ��
��
Incidentally, in spite of this Van der Stad was taken prisoner at Frevent in France on
21 May.
82 ��
H.P.
��
de Heer, “Verslag nopens de verrichtingen der troepen in Zeeuwsch-Vlaande-
ren”, 3 June 1940, in: DC-NIMH, Strijd Nederlands Grondgebied, box 464, file 10.
83 ��
Van
��
der Stad, “Verslag over de gebeurtenissen na het uitbreken van den oorlog ”.
84 ��
De
��
Heer, “Verslag nopens de verrichtingen der troepen in Zeeuwsch-Vlaanderen”.
the IXth Corps’ sector. On 22 May, the eastern part of Zeeuws-Vlaanderen

was occupied by the 227th Infantry Division. Defensive positions in west-
ern Zeeuws-Vlaanderen were now also taken up by the 1st and 2nd Belgian
Cavalry Divisions. During the night of 23 May, however, these withdrew
to behind the Leopold Canal. On 27 May, the German units also entered
western Zeeuws-Vlaanderen, the last remaining piece of unoccupied
Dutch soil. The battle on Dutch territory was over for the time being.
The advance of the XXVIth Corps had cost 190 Dutch military person-
nel their lives in northern Limburg and Noord-Brabant, namely 5 offic-
ers, 28 NCOs and 157 other ranks.85 Later another 27 military personnel
would be killed in Belgium and France, chiefly due to the sinking of the
S.S. Pavon on 20 May.86 Reliable data on German losses are unavailable,
but crossing the river Maas in particular must have cost a large number
of lives. The casualty list of the XXVIth Corps for 10 May, which gives a
total of 67 killed, seems to be a rather low estimate. At Mill alone, for in-
stance, 42 German soldiers were killed, mostly from the 481st Infantry
Regiment.87 More complete data can be given for Zeeland: a total of 38
Dutch military personnel were killed: 5 officers, 7 NCOs and 26 from the
ranks. It is typical of events in Zeeland that a much greater number of
French troops were killed in combat: the war cemetery at Kapelle is the
resting place for 229 officers and men.88 No precise data is available on
the total number of German soldiers killed. The breach of the Zanddijk
Position resulted in 22 fatalities among SS regiment ‘Deutschland’, while
one of the two SS battalions which stormed the Sloe Dam counted 17 fa-
talities. The attack on Tholen cost Gruppe-Wirtz a further 20 fatalities, and
we can therefore assume that the capture of Zeeland led to the deaths of
about 80 to 90 Germans.89
Conclusion
The advance of the XXVIth Corps through northern Limburg, Noord-

Brabant and Zeeland was hugely successful. The first major target for at-
tack, the Moerdijk bridges across the Hollands Diep, was reached on the
afternoon of 12 May. An important reason behind this success was the
capture on the early morning of 10 May of the bridge over the river Maas
��Noord-Limburg en Noord-Brabant, 482-485.

85 ��
Nierstrasz,
��Zeeland, 153-158.
86 ��
Kamerling,
Claassens and De Kruijff, Gevecht bij Mill, 181-182.
87 ��
��
88 ��
Also
��
buried here are the few French soldiers to have been killed in Noord-Brabant.
L.W. de Bree, Zeeland 1940-1945 (Middelburg, 1979) 182-184.
89 ��
��
258 chapter seven
at Gennep, which enabled an armoured train to advance to the Peel-Raam

Position at Mill. This was quite significant. The German army used sev-
eral armoured trains during the attack on the Netherlands, but the train at
Mill played a decisive role in the fall of the Peel-Raam Position. The Dutch
troops in Noord-Brabant subsequently offered little resistance. The traffic
chaos which ensued at Gennep and the limited road network slowed the
speed of the German advance.
In fact, it was really General H.G. Winkelman who had already given
up on Noord-Brabant before the war had even started. Although Noord-
Brabant, together with Zeeland, was of vital importance to the allied part-
nership with the Belgians and the French, he had decided to have the long
Peel-Raam Position defended only by the Peel Division and not by the
IIIrd Corps and the Light Division. He had also not been able to comply
with the wishes of the French and Belgians to focus the defence of Noord-
Brabant in the Tilburg area. The Commander of the Field Army, Lieuten-
ant General J.J.G. baron van Voorst tot Voorst, had also been unable to
alter this. He had been a proponent of a defence along the ’s-Hertogen-
bosch–Tilburg–Goirle line, where he wanted to build the ‘Orange Posi-
tion’. As a matter of fact, Winkelman opted for what Belgian General R.
van Overstraeten referred to as a “stratégie d’isolement”.90
The consequences of this choice, however understandable in view of
the size and quality of the army, were dramatic: when the French troops
arrived and advanced up to the area around Tilburg, exactly the location
of the proposed Orange Position, they only encountered demoralised
Dutch units and not the IIIrd Corps or the Light Division. This resulted in
the Dutch being given the rather unflattering name of “the dirty Boche of
the north”. The lack of any form of coordination between the French and
the Dutch prior to the battle also had serious consequences, partly due to
General Headquarters simply ordering Colonel L.J. Schmidt, who also had
to command the Peel Division, to coordinate with the French command-
ers. This led to unnecessary misunderstandings and chaos, which in turn
played into the hands of the Germans, who were themselves by no means
remarkable. The developments in Belgium, where on 12 May the Belgian
army withdrew to behind the Dyle Position, were decisive for the outcome
of the battle in Noord-Brabant. As a result of this withdrawal, the units of
the 7th Army present in this province were also forced to withdraw. In the
area around Breda there were only skirmishes involving rearguard parties.
In Zeeland, too, there was no effective partnership between the French
and Dutch units. This was also partly due to the choice of général Du-
90 ��
See
��
Chapter 3.
rand not to deploy French troops in the easily defendable Zanddijk Posi-
tion, but instead to position them on the banks of the Oosterschelde and
along the Zuid-Beveland Canal. Durand feared a German landing from
Tholen, which, in view of the sandbanks and tidal currents in the Oost-
erschelde, would have been a rather improbable action. As a result of Du-
rand’s decision, the forces were fragmented, something which the Dutch
Commander in Zeeland, Rear Admiral H.J. van der Stad, incidentally, did
nothing to correct. Once SS regiment ‘Deutschland’ had opened the at-
tack on Zeeland, there was little opposition from Dutch troops. Led by
what were often particularly weak commanders and demoralised by the
Dutch capitulation on 14 May and the German air attacks, many soldiers
fled even before the battle started. The defence of Zuid-Beveland and Wal-
cheren was therefore chiefly carried out by French troops, of whom over
two hundred were killed, including the courageous général Deslaurens.
Their actions were in vain, however: not only did the SS troops defeat the
French units on Walcheren and Zuid-Beveland, the German breach at Se-
dan meant that the French defence was superfluous. They would have left
Zeeland on 17 May, regardless.
The XXVIth Corps had achieved a decisive victory. A well-satisfied
General Albert Wodrig addressed his troops as follows on 1 June:
Soldiers of the XXVIth Corps! The operations of the corps in the Nether-
lands and Belgium have been completed within 22 days thanks to an un-
precedented victory. Crossing the Maas, breaching the Peel Position, linking
up with our airborne troops in the Netherlands who had been surrounded,
reaching the coast, capturing Antwerp, crossing the Scheldt, surrounding
substantial parts of the Belgian army in Flanders and fighting the remainder
of the British forces are the excellent results of your battle. (...) Long live the
Führer, our German people and fatherland and our XXVIth Corps!91
91 ��
Korps-Tagesbefehl,
��
1 June 1940, in: Feldzug in Holland u. Belgien 10.5.-1.6.1940.
Gen.Kdo. X-XVI A.K., Anl.z.K.T.B. 9.5.-1.6.1940, in: DC-NIMH, Collectie Washington
Documenten, no. 178/7.
CHAPTER EIGHT
THE FIELD ARMY DEFEATED: THE BATTLE FOR

THE GREBBE LINE
Introduction
“The forces attacking north of the rivers (mobile troops forward) first con-
quer the IJssel Line as soon as possible and immediately advance against
the eastern front of Fortress Holland.” Thus read part of the Aufmarschan-
weisung for the 18th Army, which invaded the Netherlands on 10 May
1940 under the command of General der Artillerie G.K.F.W. von Küchler.
The attack on the Dutch Field Army, entrenched at the Grebbe Line,1 was
to be carried out by the Xth Corps. This corps was commanded by General
der Artillerie Christian Hansen and consisted of the 227th Infantry Divi-
sion, reinforced with, among others, SS regiment ‘Adolf Hitler’, and the
207th Infantry Division, reinforced with SS regiment ‘Der Führer’. The lat-
ter regiment was commanded by SS Standartenführer Georg Keppler and,
unlike the Wehrmacht units, had no combat experience. The battle in the
Netherlands would be this regiment’s baptism of fire. The 526th Infantry
Division was also part of the corps, but was held in reserve.
As has been mentioned before, the main part of the Dutch Field Army
was positioned behind the Grebbe Line. These troops were expressly or-
dered to mount a “staunch defence”. To this end, the mobilised units of
the Field Army constructed an entirely new defence work after Septem-
ber 1939. They placed barbed-wire obstructions, dug trenches, built case-
mates and prepared fire plans. Where possible, part of the Gelderse Val-
lei had been inundated. The latter had not been successful, however, at
the southernmost point of the Grebbe Line, near the Grebbeberg, where
a 3.5-kilometre-wide stretch of terrain remained open and very suitable
for an attack. This objection to the Grebbe Line had been common knowl-
edge for a long time, and in earlier times it had been reason enough to opt
1 The orders from the Commander of the Field Army referred to the “Valley Position”.
This chapter will use the more familiar name “Grebbe Line”.
262 chapter eight
Construction of a
field fortification in
the Gelderse Vallei,
mobilisation 1939-1940.
for other defence lines. With the intention of improving the situation, in
the summer of 1939 the engineers had designed a bombproof pumping
station which was to create an artificial inundation area. The project was
rejected, however, on the grounds of it “being too expensive”. Six months
later, approval was given for the construction of the pumping station, this
time using a design by the Directorate-General for Public Works and Wa-
ter Management. The harsh winter of 1939-1940 meant that by May 1940,
work on the pumping station had still not been completed.2
This lack of vigour in the construction of the Grebbe Line was the
result of a lack of unity within the Dutch political and military leader-
ship regarding the question as to where the main effort of the national
defence north of the major rivers should be mounted. For a long time,
therefore, the Grebbe Line was little more than a kind of outpost position
2 V.E. Nierstrasz, De operatiën van het Veldleger en het Oostfront van de Vesting Hol-
land. Mei 1940 (The Hague, 1955) 20.
the field army defeated 263
of the eastern front of Fortress Holland. However, even when, after Gen-
eral Winkelman had been appointed commander-in-chief, the cabinet de-
cided to use the Grebbe Line for the staunch defence by the Field Army,
the maximum effort was not made to establish a position that could be
adequately defended. For instance, the cabinet refused to allow the nec-
264 chapter eight
essary hedges and orchards in the Gelderse Vallei to be chopped down,

because it feared possible high compensation claims. Not until 8 May did
the units in the front line begin clearing trees, pressurised by the circum-
stances. Ironically, this meant that on 10 May the fields were strewn with
felled trees, providing excellent cover for the attackers.3
The defence line consisted of a line of outposts, with the main resist-
ance sector behind it. In the areas where the inundations in front of the
main resistance sector provided sufficient protection, the outposts served
as a warning system. In the other areas of the Grebbe Line, the outposts
were given a “(staunch) defence task”, with the soldiers positioned in little
more than simple trenches and shelters. The main resistance sector gener-
ally consisted of two lines, the front line and the stop line. The front line
was formed by concrete casemates, cast-steel turret casemates, other em-
placements and trenches. The stop line behind the front line was to con-
tain any breaches. The soldiers in the main resistance sector were under
an “absolute ban on surrendering a single section of the terrain which
they were to defend”.4
In the spring of 1940, the German army was still assuming that, af-
ter having defended the Grebbe Line, the Dutch army would choose the
New Dutch Waterline as the location for the actual defence. Breaching the
Grebbe Line was not going to be easy, that much was clear after a spying
trip by Hauptmann R. Kriebel of the staff of Army Group B, together with
an intelligence officer of the 18th Army, Hauptmann Heinrich. Between 22
and 26 February 1940, these two captains visited the various positions un-
der construction north and south of the major rivers unhindered. Mar-
tial law had not yet been declared and nobody could do a thing to stop
the German visitors. “It was even possible to go back and forth through
the fortification zones, without being stopped once”, reported a somewhat
surprised Kriebel. The Dutch reinforcements at the Grebbe Line did not
make much of an impression. This did not mean, however, that the Ger-
mans thought that the attack would be a straightforward matter:
Nonetheless the attack on the Grebbe Line is not easy. It is hampered by the
fact that it is made impossible to support the infantry by means of directed
artillery fire by the problems in transporting the guns through the boggy
terrain, as well as by the difficulty in overseeing the Grebbe Line, which
makes reconnaissance and orientation during the attack more difficult.
3 Ibidem, 13-19.
4 ��
Hoofdkwartier
��
Veldleger, Sectie 1.1.��
Nr.��
��
1B,
��
“Geval Oost.��
Algemeen
��
Verdedigings-
bevel voor II en IV L.K.”, 23 February 1940, in: Nierstrasz, De operatiën van het Veldleger,
740-744.
According to Kriebel and Heinrich, an attack on the Grebbe Line could

best be carried out near Wageningen, “where the observation possibili-
ties are more favourable and the position has the least depth”.5 The latter
was by no means certain for the 18th Army, even after the head of the in-
telligence division of the staff of Army Group B, Major Mantey, had vis-
ited the Grebbe Line between 6 and 8 March. He concluded that this line
had “a deeply extended system of positions” and could best be breached at
Wageningen.
The attack on the Grebbe Line will be easiest in the area of Wageningen.
(…) After the Grebbeberg, which dominates a considerable length of the
Grebbe Line to the north, has been taken, it will be easy to render the fur-
ther defence of the Grebbe Line impossible.6
Nonetheless, the Xth Corps decided to attack the Dutch Field Army along
two approaches: the 227th Infantry Division, commanded by Generalma-
jor F. Zickwolff, would attack along the Apeldoorn–Amersfoort axis, and
the 207th Infantry Division, commanded by Generalleutnant Karl von Tie-
deman, would attack further south.
The latter division held the view that, despite Major Mantey’s opinion,
the southern part of the Grebbe Line could best be breached near Ede.
Entirely in keeping with the principles of Auftragstaktik, the army group
did not impose its views on the division. In order to be able to make a de-
finitive decision regarding the location of the main effort of the attack, the
chief of staff of the 207th Infantry Division, Oberstleutnant H. von Zitse-
witz, went to the Netherlands to see the situation for himself.7 On 6 April
1940, he filed a report of his trip, in which he concurred with the views
of Army Group B that the main effort of the attack should be near Wage-
ningen, because he, too, now realised that “this is where the position is
weakest and where there are the best observation possibilities for a strong
artillery”.8 The main objective of the Xth Corps for the first day of war was
to capture as many bridges across the IJssel as possible, with the main
force of the 207th Infantry Division pushing through to Rhenen, behind
the Grebbe Line, that very same day. Before they reached the Grebbe Line,
the Germans were to expect resistance from five lightly armed Dutch bor-
5 R. Kriebel, “Bericht über eine Reise durch die Niederlande vom 22.-26. Februar
1940”, 6 March 1940, in: Documentatie Nederlands Instituut voor Militaire Historie Den
Haag (DC-NIMH), Collectie Washington Documenten, no. 175/9.
6 Mantey, “Erkundung Holland in der Zeit vom 6.-8-3.40”, 12 March 1940, in: DC-
NIMH, Collectie Washington Documenten, no. 175/9.
7 Not Generalmajor F. Zickwolff as L. de Jong reports. See: J.W.M. Schulten, “Dr. L. de
Jong en de Grebbelinie”, Parade, III-1 (1982) 36-38.
8 Schulten, “Dr. L. de Jong”, 37.
Guard at a bridge
over the Twenthe Canal,
winter 1939-1940 (left);
setting charges for
the demolition of
a bridge (below).
der battalions and from troops of the so-called IJssel Line, who were com-
manded by the Territorial Commander in Overijssel, Colonel J. Dwars.
The fall of the IJssel Line
The border battalions positioned in Overijssel and Gelderland had two

assignments. Firstly, they were to ascertain whether any troops were
crossing the border and report accordingly, and then they were to place
obstacles and carry out demolitions. These obstacles were only planned
for the paved roads. As the Germans had had ample opportunity before
May 1940 to reconnoitre the planned obstacles, they were well aware that
they would in fact be of little real value. The army leadership, however,
was counting on the border battalions’ activities ensuring that the IJs-
sel Line would not be taken by surprise. ‘IJssel Line’ was, incidentally, a
rather broad term for the relatively weak Dutch positions behind the river
IJssel. Five battalions, mainly armed with machine guns, had positioned
themselves along the 120-kilometre west bank of the river, and had been
ordered to fight to the last man. The Commander of the Field Army thus
wanted to prevent the subordinate commanders of the IJssel Line from
“contemplating a retreat too soon”.9 Defence in the depth, however, was
entirely impossible. The only troops between the IJssel Line and the Greb-
be Line were three regiments of hussars which, if the IJssel Line were to
fall, were to further delay the German advance either on bicycles or on
horseback, and maintain contact with the enemy. After completing this
task, they were to fall back behind the Grebbe Line and make themselves
available to the corps commanders, as reserve troops.
The attack by the two reinforced German divisions on the central part
of the Netherlands officially began in the early hours of 10 May, at 03.55
hrs to be precise. However, a raiding patrol of Bataillon zur besondere
Verwendung 100 (see Chapter 7), in fake Dutch uniforms, had gone in
advance, having been ordered to capture the bridge at Westervoort un-
damaged. The main force of the 207th Infantry Division, with Keppler’s SS
regiment at the front, was to advance across this bridge. Other units of
this division would try to take the IJssel bridges at Doesburg, and then
rejoin the main force.
The German plan for the capture of the bridge at Westervoort failed.
Even though the raid patrol succeeded in slipping through the line of bor-
9 A. van der Wiel en V.E. Nierstrasz, De krijgsverrichtingen ten oosten van de IJssel en
in de IJssellinie. Mei 1940 (The Hague, 1952) 110.
268 chapter eight
der posts unseen, they were stopped at Didam at 03.00 hrs. Reserve Lieu-
tenant T. Koster was suspicious of their cardboard helmets and strange
weapons and alerted his company commander, Captain C.F.H. Seyffart,
who in turn warned the Territorial Commander in Overijssel. The latter
personally gave the order to disarm the German patrol and to shoot them
if they resisted. The disarmament and capture of the Germans posed no
problems. Their Dutch guides had disappeared, so there was little point in
resisting capture.10
Nonetheless, it did not take long for strong German units to cross the
border in the direction of Arnhem and free the raid patrol. Some short
exchanges of fire were all that was needed to eliminate the border guard
detachments of the 22nd Border Battalion. Meanwhile, however, the com-
mander of the 4th company of the IInd battalion of the 35th Infantry Regi-
ment (4-III-35 RI), Captain C.F. Heijnen, under whose command Fort
Westervoort and the nearby bridges stood, had been alerted. He immedi-
ately ordered all prepared obstacles and barricades to be put in place. This
order had only just been carried out when a German armoured train ap-
peared at the bridges. Captain Heijnen was quick to act: “I repeated my or-
der ‘blow them up immediately’ and it was carried out swiftly.” The time
was 04.45 hrs. The armoured train was then fired upon with the only 8-Staal
gun at the location, which was positioned in one of the river casemates. Af-
ter eight shots, however, the gun was no longer operable (the breech of the
gun had been destroyed) and the casemate had to be abandoned.
More or less the same thing happened in the other river casemates. Af-
ter a few shots had been fired with the machine guns there, these guns
malfunctioned as well, leaving the gun crews with no other choice but
to retreat. It was therefore not long before Fort Westervoort came under
heavy artillery fire. Fire broke out in a key section of the fort and all com-
munications failed. In the end, only two light machine guns remained in-
tact, which made the prospects rather bleak for the Dutch troops. At 08.00
hrs, German infantry soldiers crossed the river in rubber dinghies. An
hour later, the fort commander considered the situation to be untenable
and tried, unsuccessfully, to escape.11 The Germans then immediately laid
a pontoon bridge across the IJssel which was ready at 16.00 hrs. The road
to Arnhem lay open.
10 ��
A.
��
van Soest, “Verslag grensoverschrijding in vak 22 G.B. op 10 mei 1940”, in: DC-
11 ��
��
C.F. Heijnen, “Verslag van oorlogshandelingen, welke op 9 en 10 mei 1940 in de
omgeving van Westervoort hebben plaatsgevonden”, in: DC-NIMH, Strijd Nederlands
The IJssel bridge at Westervoort, seen from the fort.
Demolition of the bridge over the IJssel at Deventer on 10 May.

270 chapter eight
How were the other German units faring? They encountered little re-
sistance from the border battalions, although they were, of course, hin-
dered by the many obstacles on the route. Most of the Dutch detachments
east of the IJssel surrendered without a fight, which was to be expected
given their orders and the German forces’ superiority. Other detachments,
however, tried to retreat, and several soldiers simply borrowed civilian
clothes, took off their uniforms and went home.
The German troops were unable to capture any of the bridges across
the IJssel undamaged. A regiment of the 207th Infantry Division was
quickly able, however, to repair the partially destroyed boat bridge at
Doesburg: a number of pontoons were launched to fill the gap in the boat
bridge. At 11.30 hrs, the division had crossed the river. Although the 207th
Infantry Division had therefore not achieved its objective, namely to cap-
ture the IJssel bridges intact, its actions had in fact been highly successful.
In a relatively short space of time, it had crossed the IJssel and was able to
advance towards Rhenen.
The 227th Infantry Division ran into greater problems. Three mobile
groups had been formed: Schnelle Gruppe Nord, which, led by the com-
mander of SS regiment ‘Adolf Hitler’, Sepp Dietrich, was to capture the
bridges at Zwolle and Deventer; Schnelle Gruppe Mitte, which was to take
the bridges at Zutphen and Schnelle Gruppe Süd, which was to try to cross
the IJssel between Bronkhorst and Zutphen. Both Schnelle Gruppe Mitte
and Schnelle Gruppe Süd reached the IJssel at around 08.00 hrs, where all
the bridges had been blown up. Division commander Zickwolff decided to
try and have Schnelle Gruppe Mitte cross the river just south of Zutphen.
The first rubber dinghies took to the water at 11.20 hrs, under cover of ar-
tillery fire. The Dutch troops of the Ist battalion of the 35th Infantry Regi-
ment, led by Reserve Major H.J. Tromp, put up strong resistance, however.
The 3rd company, under Captain B. Mulder, distinguished itself in particu-
lar by sinking several of the dinghies.12 Many German soldiers were killed.
When a number of river casemates had been put out of action by the Ger-
man artillery, however, and the Dutch troops ran out of ammunition, some
German soldiers managed to reach the west bank, at 14.15 hrs.
Generalmajor Zickwolff decided to have both Schnelle Gruppe Mitte
and Schnelle Gruppe Süd cross the IJssel at Zutphen and, after these two
groups had established a sufficiently large bridgehead, a bridge was to
be laid across the IJssel, to allow the 227th Infantry Division to advance.
Meanwhile, after a rather slow advance (they did not arrive in Deventer
12 ��
��
B. Mulder, “Bericht en gegevens betreffende het gevecht op 10 mei 1940 te Zut-
phen”, June 1940, in: DC-NIMH, Strijd Nederlands Grondgebied, box 498, file 9.
until 12.05 hrs), Sepp Dietrich’s Schnelle Gruppe Nord had done little more
than establish that it was not possible to cross the IJssel either in Zwolle
or in Deventer. The bridges had been destroyed and the Dutch defences
looked too strong. Zickwolff therefore decided to have Schnelle Gruppe
Nord cross the river at Zutphen as well.
It would be some time, however, before the 227th Infantry Division
could make the crossing at Zutphen. Not only was the entire division
forced to cross the river at one point, there was a delay in the building of
the pontoon bridge as well. The parts intended for this bridge had already
been used to cross the Twenthe Canal. Zickwolff therefore had to ask the
commander of the Xth Corps, General Hansen, for additional materials. It
took a long while for new bridge sections to be delivered and, in addition,
new delays occurred at the Apeldoorn Canal. It was not until 12 May that
the 227th Infantry Division was able to advance towards the Grebbe Line
at full strength.
The IJssel Line had fallen fairly rapidly, but this was not entirely sur-
prising. There were no reserves or artillery and all the infantry weapons
were on the front line. There was no depth in the line whatsoever. The
German divisions, with their more modern equipment, were able to
breach the weak line rather easily. The German advance was not delayed
significantly anywhere by Dutch military operations, except at Zutphen.
The fact that the 227th Infantry Division did not cross the IJssel until 12
May had more to do with a lack of materials with which to build the pon-
toon bridge than with insurmountable Dutch resistance. The defending
troops had, however, succeeded in demolishing all the bridges on time.
On the one hand this was owing to the fact that the alert system had
worked well and on the other hand thanks to the decisive actions of a few
officers, for instance in the case of the bridges at Westervoort. All of this
was, however, to no avail: the German advance continued.
The attack on the outposts of the IVth Division
On the evening of 10 May, the 207th Infantry Division, headed by SS regi-

ment ‘Der Führer’, reached the evacuated town of Wageningen. Every-
thing pointed to the Dutch IVth Division being able to repel the first Ger-
man attack. The division comprised three organic regiments, the 8th, 11th
and 19th Infantry Regiments. On 10 May 1940, the division only had the
8th and 19th Infantry Regiments at its disposal, because the 11th Infantry
Regiment had been withdrawn from the division and was operating with
two of its battalions as a reserve of the IInd Corps and with one battalion
272 chapter eight
Field Army from 10 May 1940

XXXX
XXX XXX XXX X

TBO Eastern front of
2 4 3 (-) A
B Fortress Holland
G
XX XX XX
2 7 5
8x 4 8 6 8x
other
units
as a reserve of the IInd Division. One regiment was positioned on and in

front of the Grebbeberg: the 8th Infantry Regiment, commanded by Lieu-
tenant Colonel W.F. Hennink. This regiment consisted of the customary
three battalions: the Ist battalion, commanded by Major W.P. Landzaat,
was to defend the Grebbeberg itself; the IInd, led by Reserve Major J.H.A.
Jacometti, was to defend the area immediately north of the Grebbeberg,
and the IIIrd was positioned in the outpost sector. The 2nd company of the
IIIrd battalion, incidentally, was attached to the Ist battalion, and positioned
in the main resistance sector. The IIIrd battalion of 8 RI was commanded
by Major C.J. Voigt and was reinforced with four 6-Veld field guns. The
battalion’s heavy machine guns were badly positioned: their field of fire
was far too limited. In addition, the combat positions were nowhere near
ready yet. Despite a missive from Lieutenant General J.J.G. baron van
Voorst tot Voorst, the defence works were still covered with wire, netting
and camouflage material. They were therefore “mousetraps, from which
there were no good lookout possibilities”.13
Effective command was limited in the outpost sector. Not only was
the view blocked by hedges and both felled and standing trees (their own
group was generally all the section commanders could see of their sec-
tion), but communications were also inadequate. Only the battalion com-
mander had a phone connection to the company commanders and his
regiment commander. Messages between the units of the battalion had to
be sent by courier. If necessary, Voigt could contact the main resistance
sector by means of the ultra-shortwave radio of the artillery signals officer
in his command post.
��Operatiën Veldleger, 174.

13 ��
Nierstrasz,
The felling of trees to improve the field of fire.
Digging the Drainage Canal in the Gelderse Vallei, south of the Amersfoort–Hoevelaken road.
274 chapter eight
On 10 May, the Germans did not attack the Grebbeberg or the rest of
the line yet. Ominous reports about strangely attired German troops were
received, however, from the 4th Hussars Regiment, which was to main-
tain combat contact in the southern Veluwe area and had been driven out
by the German division. This increased the tension in the positions, and
most soldiers were unable to get any sleep. On the early morning of 11
May, at around 02.00 hrs, a heavy German artillery bombardment began
on the outpost sector. Communications within the outpost sector soon
failed and the line between Major Voigt and the commander of the 3rd
company, Reserve Captain A. Zwarts, could not be repaired. The commu-
nications with the main resistance sector also failed. The German artillery
fire took out a number of key Dutch positions. For instance, on the south-
ern flank of the outpost sector, a heavy machine gun (positioned at the
‘De Hoop’ cement factory) and a nearby 6-Veld field gun (on the dyke at
‘Rijnzicht’) were put out of action.
At dawn, Keppler’s SS regiment ‘Der Führer’ emerged along the entire
front of the outpost sector and opened fire. The commander of the 207th
Infantry Division, Generalleutnant Karl von Tiedeman, wanted to spare
his own troops and had sent the SS, which, being more mobile, were al-
ready in the advance guard anyway, in first. Two battalions attacked and
one remained in reserve. Sturmbannführer14 Müller’s Ist battalion exerted
the most pressure. It operated in a sector between the inundation area
and the Wageningen–Rhenen road. This is where the 1st section of 3-II-19
RI was positioned, led by Reserve Lieutenant A. de Haas. These troops’
morale was far from high. When they were told during the night that
they could expect a heavy attack, they became, the section commander
later said, “very nervous because they were not covered and had no field
of fire”. The positions had not been completed by 10 May, while plenty
of cover still remained for the Germans. Morale worsened further in the
course of the night, when they came under German artillery fire, which
they mistook for friendly fire because at the same time, II-19 RA was de-
livering harassing fire on Wageningen.
At 07.30 hrs, the first SS troops of Sturmbannführer Müller’s Ist battalion
opened fire on the Dutch section. When Lieutenant De Haas received the
report that the northernmost troops were unable to hold their positions,
he ordered them to join him. Most of them fled, however, to ‘Kruiponder’
farm, situated on the front line of the Grebbe Line. Lieutenant De Haas
was therefore soon left with only one machine gun. There had been no
14 � Sturmbannführer is equal in rank to Major. For a full list of rank equivalents, see
Annex.
hand grenades from the beginning, and the 6-Veld field gun was in a posi-
tion where its crew were unable to see any Germans in their field of fire.
The section commander had little other choice than to retreat as well. At
12.00 hrs he vacated his position and reported to the commander of the 3rd
company, Captain Zwarts.
The retreat of De Haas’ section caused problems for the entire 3rd com-
pany of III-8 RI, however, most notably for the adjacent 4th section. This
section was commanded by Sergeant G. van der Esschert. At first, the sec-
tion had managed to hold its ground, despite the advantage the Germans
gained from the farms, barns, chicken coops and orchards in the terrain.
“They were not only fantastic shelters for the enemy, but also hugely ob-
structed our view, which was a great disadvantage to us during the battle”,
Sergeant J.H.B. Wissink, one of the members of the section, later said.15
Between Sergeant Van der Esschert’s and Lieutenant De Haas’ sections,
however, there was a dyke, and after the SS battalion had driven out De
Haas’ section, it had free play to the north of the dyke and was therefore
able to advance unhindered. The 4th section was “therefore soon closed
in on the left”; the men had no other option but to follow the example of
Lieutenant De Haas.
Coming from the north, the Germans were then able to round up Cap-
tain Zwarts’ 3rd company meticulously and systematically, making good
use of the cover in the terrain. This by no means meant, however, that the
SS troops, who had little combat experience, felt at ease in the outpost sec-
tor. The obstacles in the field made “the enemy almost entirely invisible”,
which meant that no artillery support could be requested.16 “The prepared
positions in the Grebbe Line proved to be essentially stronger than was
assumed according to the available reports”, concluded the Kriegstagebuch
of the SS regiment.17
The German troops then succeeded in surrounding and capturing both
the 1st and the 3rd section. Captain Zwarts’ command post was now also
in danger. The German troops made eager use of the presence of a few
hundred cows wandering among the positions,18 and at around 13.00 hrs
15 ��
Statement
��
by J.H.B. Wissink, 29 August 1941, in: DC-NIMH, Strijd Nederlands
16 ��
��
Hauptman Rechlin, “Mit Pommern und Ostmärkern in 5 Tage von Emmerich nach
Utrecht”, in: DC-NIMH, Strijd Nederlands Grondgebied, box 559b.
17 ��
SS-Rgt.��
��
‘Der
��
Führer’, “Auszug aus dem Kriegstagebuch vom 10. Mai bis 12. Juli 40”,
in: DC-NIMH, Strijd Nederlands Grondgebied, box 550.
18 ��
��
In June 1940, Captain Zwarts even referred to “± 1500 cows... which wandered
through the area of the positions”. Testimony of A. Zwarts, 26 June 1940, in: DC-NIMH,
276 chapter eight
Captain Zwarts, together with about 40 men, was surrounded. Sergeant

Wissink later recalled:
As this position had by then also been closed in on the right and the enemy
was following right behind us, it was fair to say that it was a madhouse in
the position. It was an infernal noise; the whole position was shaken to its
very foundations.
As the position had been built to deliver frontal fire and the Germans
were approaching from all sides, the situation was hopeless. After one
hour, Captain Zwarts surrendered.
The SS battalion which eliminated Captain Zwarts’ company also
mounted an attack on the Grebbeberg itself, with about a hundred men.
Near the ‘Kruiponder’ farm, the Germans tried to cross the Grebbe, a
small river. The 4th section of 2-II-8 RI, led by Reserve Lieutenant H.H.C.
Vos repelled the attack, however, and for some time after that no new at-
tempt was made. The German troops were in no hurry: the outposts had
to be eliminated first.
By now the IIIrd battalion of the SS regiment, led by Obersturmbann-
führer H. Wäckerle, had begun to move on the southern flank of the
outposts. This was the area defended by the 1st company of III-8 RI, led
by Reserve Captain G.J. Gouda. At around 12.30 hrs, the SS battalion
succeeded in surrounding and capturing the most northern group of his
section (the furthest advanced post of the Dutch company). Earlier, the
6-Veld field gun to the south of this section had been put out of action by
German artillery fire (see above), so that the section could no longer ex-
pect any support from either the north or the south. Section commander
Ensign G.J. Bijlsma therefore decided to continue the fight from a posi-
tion to the rear. Battalion commander Voigt, however, ordered: “Section
must stand firm and if necessary position a light machine gun in Rijnzicht
with the firing order to protect the left flank”.19 The order was, however,
impossible to carry out. Ensign Bijlsma and his men eventually went back
to the position of the 1st section of Reserve Lieutenant D.H. Lindeman.
The thus reinforced 1st section came under increasing pressure in the
course of the afternoon. First it successfully delivered flanking fire on a
German attack on the adjacent 4th section of Ensign H. Nahuijsen. The at-
tack was repelled and many Germans were killed. At 15.00 hrs, however,
the 1st section was itself attacked. Ensign Bijlsma’s section put up fierce
resistance, but another group planted a white flag. The Germans did not
appreciate Bijlsma’s continuing to fight at all. After they had taken the po-
sition, they dealt summarily with the Dutch soldiers. The only survivor,
Private A.H. Könning, later stated:
19 ��
C.J.
��
Voigt, “Verslag der weerstandbiedende voorposten van 8 R.I. van vrijdag 10
mei t/m zaterdag 11 mei 1940”, 21 June 1940, in: DC-NIMH, Strijd op Nederlands Grond-
gebied, box 509, file 1.
Dutch conscripts
working on their
position (left);
pioneering on
the Grebbe Line,
mobilisation
1939-1940 (below).
They had me open the shelters and then they threw in hand grenades. The
straw pallets were then set alight (…) After it had been set on fire, I crawled
through the position, but all the soldiers were dead.20
When Section commander Lindeman became aware of all this from his
post further to the rear, he decided to pull back further. Eventually, he and
his men crossed the Rhine at the ferry at Opheusden.
Despite all of this, the greatest threat to the 1st company did not come
from the east, but from the north, where the 3rd company was gradually
being rounded up. Major Voigt, the battalion commander, was of course
aware of this and made attempts to request artillery fire. Communications
had failed, however; couriers who had been sent out were not heard from
again and the radio battery was dead. Lacking artillery support, the two
sections of the machine-gun company which were in the 3rd company’s
sector were surrounded and taken prisoner. The 4th section of 1-III-8 RI,
which had earlier been able to repel an attack with the help of Lieuten-
ant Lindeman’s section, now suffered a similar fate: under attack from the
north, they were no longer able to defend themselves. Continuing to fire,
Ensign Nahuijsen’s men retreated to the Grenshoeve. Major Voigt’s com-
mand post was now in immediate danger. To the north, his only protec-
tion was provided by the Nahuijsen group, and to the east he was protected
by the 3rd section of Sergeant Major B.L.A. Blom, one group of which had
already retreated at 14.00 hrs, and by the 2nd section of the machine-gun
company. Nobody from the latter section had remained at his post, how-
ever: as early as the evening of the 10th and the early morning of the 11th,
Sergeants J.C. van der Neut and J.H.W. Sandijck had urged Ensign J. Tack
to retreat, because they did not expect any Germans to enter their field
of fire. Eventually the section commander gave in without having fired a
shot and left his position, having first left behind “a torn white cloth at-
tached to a strip of wood”. Sergeant Major Blom’s section stood alone.
The SS troops were having great difficulty capturing this section’s po-
sitions. As one of his men later said, Blom was “a stout and calm man,
20 ��
��
Testimony of A.H. Könning, 12 July 1940, in: DC-NIMH Strijd Nederlands Grond-
gebied, box 509, file 4. Nierstrasz, De operatiën van het Veldleger en het Oostfront van de
Vesting Holland. Mei 1940, says the following on page 183 about the actions of the Bijlsma
section: “Apparently, white flags were placed on one side of the group position by the men,
while on the other side the ensign, who did not know this, was firing heavily.��
This
��
had seri-
ous consequences for both groups.��
��
The ensign himself, while firing on the parados, was se-
riously wounded, lost consciousness and when he came round discovered that the positions
had been taken by the Germans. They had dealt summarily with the men and set fire to the
positions, whereby only one man escaped, by pretending to be dead.”
280 chapter eight
who gave good orders and put us at ease”.21 Indeed the entire group put
up an excellent fight, until they caught sight of the white flag left behind
by the machine-gun section. “First I fired at it”, said Blom, “and then Pri-
vate Migchelbrink went over there, under heavy machine-gun and mor-
tar fire, to retrieve it. He came back with the flag in his mouth, but had
seen nobody”.22 These actions were no longer of any consequence for the
defence of the battalion commander’s command post, however. By 16.00
hrs, Major Voigt had been surrounded, and half an hour later he surren-
dered, considering “further resistance no longer served any purpose and
was pointless”. Captain Gouda followed suit shortly after.
The Germans now had the opportunity to take around fifty men and
storm Sergeant Major Blom’s section, which by then comprised just 12
men. Eventually, the section commander was forced to conclude: “We
can’t hold out any longer.” Thus the last Dutch outpost surrendered. By
now it was 17.30 hrs. German troops entered the trench and drove the
Dutch soldiers out. Three privates from Blom’s group were shot. One of
them survived, but the other two died, G. Migchelbrink, mentioned ear-
lier, and J. Riggeling. There is some uncertainty as to the exact course of
events. The various witness statements show that tensions on both sides
had risen considerably. The battles had lasted all afternoon and Blom and
his men had been the last to surrender, and not until there was no other
option left. The Germans did not cease firing immediately when the sur-
render began, Riggeling was very agitated during the surrender and it is
possible that a short argument took place between Migchelbrink and a
German soldier. The sources also provide another explanation, however,
for the deaths of Migchelbrink and Riggeling. Conscript Sergeant L. Meij-
erink said of Migchelbrink: “When he left the position, he shot one more
German, and was then himself shot”. Whatever the case may be, the other
prisoners of war were then threatened with execution. A German officer
was able to prevent that, however, by suggesting that the men be used as
human shields while the outposts were searched. All the positions proved
to have been abandoned. To their immense relief, the prisoners of war
were taken away unharmed.23
21 ��
��
Statement by J. v.d. Linden, 5 December 1946, in: DC-NIMH, Strijd Nederlands
Statements by B.L.A. Blom, 5 July 1940 and 5 December 1946, in: Ibidem.
22 ��
��
23 ��
See
��
the statements mentioned in notes 21 and 22 and the testimony of L. Meijerink,
undated (possibly July 1940), in: Ibidem. See also P.H. Kamphuis, “Onderzoeksrapportage
betreffende de gang van zaken tijdens en na de overgave van de derde sectie van 1-III-8 RI
op 11 mei 1940”, 11 July 1990, and the witness statements therein by the members of the
Blom group who were still alive in 1990 in: DC-NIMH, Strijd Nederlands Grondgebied,
box 509, file 6A.
Infantry position behind the Valley Canal.
SS Standartenführer Keppler was well pleased: his regiment had en-

dured its baptism of fire magnificently. He therefore decided to mount an
attack on the main resistance sector that same night, at 22.00 hrs to be
precise, so that his IInd battalion would be able to push through to Rhenen
early next morning.
During and after the war, there was considerable criticism of the ac-
tions of the Grebbe Line outposts. That criticism was undeserved. On 11
May, a battle was in progress in the area between Wageningen and the
Grebbeberg, between Dutch troops in incomplete positions and a meticu-
lously prepared advance guard of a German division. Major Voigt’s IIIrd
battalion had to contend with extremely poor communications and, partly
as a result thereof, an almost entire lack of artillery support. Some Dutch
soldiers abandoned their posts, which of course did not make things any
easier for the remaining troops. The majority fought, according to Ger-
man sources, “extremely bravely and tenaciously and generally put up a
fight to the very end”.24 Eventually, however, the Dutch troops were defeat-
ed in a regular infantry duel, in which the untidy terrain was of great im-
portance to the Germans, despite the uncertainty it brought them. One by
one the sections were surrounded, sometimes even before they had seen a
24 ��
��
SS-Rgt.��
��
‘Der Führer’, “Auszug aus dem Kriegstagebuch vom 10. Mai bis 12. Juli 1940”.
282 chapter eight
single German, and forced to surrender. The state of the terrain did mean,
however, that this mop-up operation took all day. It was difficult for the
Germans to plough their way through, as a German officer later said.
Despite the fact that Major Voigt’s IIIrd battalion had been defeated
within a day, it had still completed its task: it had taken the SS troops until
18.00 hrs to gain full control of the outpost sector. In the meantime the
Grebbe Line had been fully manned and was on alert.
General Harberts’ countermeasures
How were the events of 11 May assessed by the commander of the IInd
Corps, Major General J. Harberts? As early as 10 May, the general’s head-
quarters at Doorn received a constant stream of reports about paratroops
which were said to have landed on the Grebbeberg, about suspicious sol-
diers and about fifth-column activity. All these rumours proved untrue,
but did cause considerable tension among Harberts’ staff. On the morning
of 11 May, the first reports came in of enemy artillery fire, and at 12.35 hrs
the commander of the IVth Division, Colonel A.A.M. van Loon, reported
that all communications with the outposts had been lost. Harberts still
had no insight at all, however, into what was happening at the Grebbe-
berg. Harberts suspected that the 8th Infantry Regiment was facing “weak
troops only”. When he heard just after 13.00 hrs that both the right and
left wings of Major Voigt’s battalion were retreating, the corps command-
er was furious. The lost ground had to be recaptured “immediately”. “The
most dubious point”, according to Harberts, was
that our troops appear to be putting up hardly any resistance, otherwise this
sudden retreat, without any reports of serious exchanges of fire and without
any request for artillery support for the outposts, can hardly be explained.
The possibility that the latter was mainly the result of the loss of com-
munications, as had been reported to the general earlier, did not occur
to him. No, it was the “aggravating cowardice among officers, NCOs and
other ranks of at least part of III-8 RI” which was to be blamed for the im-
pending loss of the outpost sector. “Quick and forceful punishment of the
cowards is necessary as a preventive measure”, Harberts concluded.25
The corps commander was supported in this view by the report that
the Ensign Tack’s 2nd section of the machine-gun company had retreated
25 ��
��
J. Harberts, “Gereconstrueerd dagboek over de dagen 10 t/m 14 mei 1940”, in: DC-
II nd Corps 12 mei
May 1940
1940
XXX
XX XX
2 4 4 3 11(-) 15 (-) 1 12
19 (-)
10 8
15 19
22
2 11 8 (-)
4 1 4
2 8 1 11
1 2 4 (-)
7 4
4
16
2
14
without actually having been attacked. Another report told of a sergeant

of the 19th Infantry Regiment who had been arrested in Nieuwersluis
in possession of an antitank gun. Harberts considered this report to be
“hardly plausible”, but wanted the sergeant in question to be shot if it was
true. This would of course require sentencing by a drumhead court mar-
tial, but none had been appointed yet.
On 10 May an “Organisational Decree for Judicial Procedure in the
Field 1940” had been issued, which made it possible for commanding
generals to appoint courts martial “in each case when the service will re-
quire it or allow it”. Harberts therefore asked the Commander of the Field
Army to be allowed to appoint such a court martial. Eventually, at 22.00
hrs, a message from the commander-in-chief, General Winkelman, ar-
rived, stating that the corps commanders were allowed to appoint their
own courts martial. At 23.00 hrs, the military judge advocate sent by Van
Voorst tot Voorst, Reserve Captain J.J. Plugge, reported to Harberts, as
284 chapter eight
did the examining judge, Reserve Captain R.J.W.C. van den Wall Bake,
and the officer-secretary for the court martial, Reserve Lieutenant C.H.
Beekhuis. All three officers were trained lawyers. The corps commander
received them personally and said that “an example had to be made of
someone immediately”, thinking in particular of Ensign Tack. Strict pun-
ishment was needed, to serve as a “deterrent for the troops”. Harberts
demanded of the examining judge that the report on Tack’s conduct be
ready by 09.00 hrs the next morning. “You gentlemen will just have to
work through the night”, he concluded his speech.26
In the meantime, Harberts had also decided to take military counter-
measures. He sent for division commander Van Loon at 18.00 hrs and
ordered him to recapture the outpost sector that same night. Van Loon
suggested waiting until first light, but Harberts had no patience whatso-
ever and wanted action. Colonel Van Loon thereupon sent for the com-
mander of his reserve battalion, Reserve Major J.B. van Apeldoorn of
II-19 RI, and ordered him to carry out a counterattack “with edged weap-
ons” that night, with the purpose of “recapturing their own outpost posi-
tions”. Support was to be provided between the Grebbe and Wageningen
by a number of troops of III-8 RI, which would be put ashore by the gun-
boat HNLMS Freyr, which was on guard duty on the Rhine. “There are no
more than 100 enemy soldiers in front of you”, Van Loon reassured Major
Van Apeldoorn,27 vastly underestimating the strength of the enemy troops
which, after all, comprised two entire battalions.
Having received their orders, the soldiers of Van Apeldoorn’s battalion
advanced over the Grebbeberg in the direction of the former hornwork,
where the attack on the Germans was to begin. Just before they set foot
on the Grebbeberg, Colonel Van Loon spoke some words of encourage-
ment to them. The battalion had only advanced a few hundred metres,
however, when it came under “heavy machine-gun and rifle fire” from the
8th Infantry Regiment, which was positioned in the stop line and had no
idea of the counterattack. Van Apeldoorn yelled: “Hold your fire, friendly
troops!”, but to no avail.28
In addition, most of the soldiers on the Grebbeberg were extremely
nervous. Not only had they been under continuous heavy artillery fire
all day, the stories told by the soldiers fleeing the outpost sector were ex-
Testimony of J. Harberts, 16 June 1948, in: Enquêtecommissie Regeringsbeleid 1940-

26 ��
��
1945. Verslag houdende de uitkomsten van het onderzoek. Deel Ic (The Hague, 1949) 444.
27 ��
Nierstrasz,
28 ��
J.B.
��
van Apeldoorn, “Verslag oorlogshandelingen II-19 R.I. tijdens de Meidagen
1940”, in: DC-NIMH, Strijd Nederlands Grondgebied, box 510, file 15.
Dutch infantry position on the Grebbe Line, behind the inundation area.
tremely alarming. The Dutch troops had been particularly affected by the
camouflage gear of the Germans. They made a “devilish impression” and
for the troops on the Grebbeberg, which kept seeing white flags appear
in the terrain in front of them, this did not bode well. To add to the con-
fusion, Ouwehands Zoo, situated on the Grebbeberg, had set free all its
tropical birds and its monkeys. The racket made by these animals in the
night was too much for some soldiers: they fired their weapons in the di-
rection of every sound they heard.
It therefore took Major Van Apeldoorn a considerable amount of time
to silence the guns of the 8th Infantry Regiment. The amount of time lost
meant that the counterattack had already all but failed. Dawn was break-
ing, so a surprise attack was now out of the question. The Freyr had also
not turned up. Van Apeldoorn therefore decided to do an about-turn. In
the meantime, Lieutenant Colonel Hennink had ordered the artillery to
open fire on the outpost sector. This action yielded unintended results.
The nightly attack on the Grebbeberg by the SS regiment, which was to
start at 22.00 hrs was cancelled by Keppler.
General Harberts’ countermeasures had been rather poor. This was due
to the incorrect assumption that only weak German troops had arrived
in front of the Grebbeberg. He therefore attributed the loss of the out-
post sector fully to cowardly conduct on the part of his subordinates. He
286 chapter eight
thought that by making an example of someone he would be able to put a

stop to it. In addition, they would need just one battalion to recapture the
lost territory. Poor preparations meant that this counterattack had failed
before it had even begun.
The German attack on the main resistance sector
What was then the situation with the troops of Christian Hansen’s Xth
Corps on the night of 11 May? Two mobile groups of the 227th Infantry
Division had reached Barneveld, but the majority of the division was still
crossing the IJssel. Generalleutnant von Tiedeman’s 207th Infantry Divi-
sion had been more successful. The outposts at the Grebbeberg had been
cleared and the division was poised to launch its attack on the main Dutch
positions. Support was to be expected from three artillery regiments po-
sitioned near Wageningen. General Hansen was satisfied: from his com-
mand post in Velp he thanked his divisions for completing their first
assignment and ordered them to prepare the attack on the New Dutch
Waterline. In order to do so, the Grebbe Line had to be taken at all cost.
The Dutch artillery fire during the night had convinced division com-
mander Karl von Tiedeman that he was faced with a strongly defended po-
sition. “On the basis of the battles of 11 May, the regiment was convinced
that an attack on the Grebbeberg would not be possible without strong
artillery preparations.” Besides the three artillery battalions he already
had (II/A.R. SS; III/A.R. 207; IV/A.R. 256), he brought another two bat-
talions into position (III/A.R. 311; II/A.R. 207). The German artillery was
positioned so that it was not visible from the Dutch positions. The Dutch
troops on the Grebbeberg were powerless to stop the barrage of artillery
fire, which continued all through the morning of 12 May. Shortly after
noon, the fire was concentrated on the hornwork and the forward rim of
the Grebbeberg. The Dutch troops positioned there were thus forced to
take cover in the shelters, where they waited anxiously for events to unfold.
At 12.40 hrs, the artillery fell silent and Sturmbannführer Fritz von
Scholz’s IInd battalion, which had been held in reserve on 11 May, and the
IIIrd battalion of the SS regiment attacked the hornwork. Parts of the 1st
and 2nd companies of I-8 RI, the latter company commanded by Reserve
Captain R.E.J. Collette, were positioned on the Dutch side. On the night
of 11 May, these troops had already been faced with an acute shortage of
ammunition. This naturally had an effect on their confidence. The 2nd sec-
tion of 2-I-8 RI had even retreated. The battalion commander, Major W.P.
Landzaat, explicitly ordered Captain Collette to reoccupy all positions. If
X. Armeekorps May 1940
XXX
10
XX XX XX
207 526 227
322 328
368 366
374 412
SSDF SSAH
207 227
4 256(-) 227
3 311 SS4
DivTr 1 697
207
735 12 256
7 1 207
DivTr
227
4
288 chapter eight
the soldiers in question refused to carry out the order, said Landzaat, then
they would just have to be shot. Not a single officer, however, was able
to get the retreated troops moving again. The one person who was suc-
cessful was Private J.F.C. Toelen, an orderly who saw to it personally that
a number of the positions were occupied again. “In effect, Toelen was in
charge”, another private said later:
Although it wasn’t right, we were glad that at least someone was taking
charge. The captain did not keep morale up. (…) He was very dejected. Toe-
len kept up morale and cheered us all up.29
This, of course, did not change the fact that there was a shortage of am-
munition. Various sections therefore soon retreated from the hornwork,
some in a panic. Other posts raised white flags. Again, Toelen acted at the
risk of his own life. “I am a devout Catholic and did not think that I would
be killed”, he later explained.30 Toelen conveyed the order to the sections
in the hornwork that they were to fight to the last man, after which he also
removed a white flag. It was to no avail, however. There was not much
they could do with so little ammunition and the German troops took con-
trol of the hornwork.
The SS units kept going. They repaired the demolished bridge over the
Grift and advanced along the so-called hollow road, the road from Wage-
ningen to Rhenen, which had been hollowed out in the Grebbeberg. The
4th section of Captain Collette’s company was positioned north of that
road. This section had lent one of its machine guns to the troops in the
hornwork, a second was unserviceable and the field of fire of the third, po-
sitioned in one of the casemates, was limited. The 4th section was therefore
not able to put up much resistance. The enemy would therefore have to be
held off by troops to the south of the hollow road. The 3rd section of the
machine-gun company of I-8 RI was positioned here, in three casemates.
It, too, was unable to do anything, however. Overgrowth, trees which had
been felled by artillery fire and smoke from a burning farm blocked their
view. In addition, given the way the machine guns were positioned, they
were unable to deliver fire on the hollow road. The casemates were at-
tacked from the rear and eliminated by the Germans, who were advancing
along the hollow road. They thus established a strong bridgehead across
the Grift.
29 ��
��
Statement by J. Gerritsen, 17 June 1940, in: DC-NIMH, Strijd Nederlands Grondge-
bied box 507, file 12.
30 ��
Testimony
��
of J.F.C. Toelen, in: DC-NIMH, Strijd Nederlands Grondgebied, box
507, file 12.
SS taking cover.
The SS troops then expanded this bridgehead, both to the west and to
the north. To the north, they first attacked the remnants of the 2nd sec-
tion of 2-I-8 RI, which then fled. The 1st section, positioned further north
again, was put out of action by antitank guns. A number of Dutch soldiers
were killed. The same happened further along. Machine-gun and artillery
fire put the infantry guns on the front line out of action and the Dutch
soldiers were killed, captured or they fled. To the west, German fire also
eliminated various casemates until they reached the stop line. German
firepower was proving decisive. The Dutch troops, weak and with ineffec-
tive support from their own artillery, as yet came off worst.
Although the SS troops had established a permanent bridgehead across
the Grift, the road by which they had arrived was still being covered by
flanking fire from sections of the IInd battalion of the 8th Infantry Regi-
ment. This was such a hindrance (the Germans spoke of “heavy fire from
the flanking positions”) that SS Standartenführer Keppler deployed his Ist
battalion against it. The Dutch troops, confused by reports from soldiers
fleeing the hornwork, did not know what to do. Some fled, others retreat-
ed. Eventually, on the evening of 12 May, the Germans had control of the
front line of 1-II-8 RI, as well as the entire area in front of the stop line of
I-8 RI. Had the Dutch not taken any countermeasures then? Indeed they
had, but to no avail. The most remarkable counterattack was that by the
290 chapter eight
commander of the IInd battalion of the 8th Infantry Regiment, Reserve Ma-
jor J.H.A. Jacometti. He had deduced from the reports he received from
the front line that small German units were storming the Grebbeberg. The
former officer of the Royal Netherlands East Indies Army therefore decid-
ed to push the enemy off the hill with a single substantial counterattack.
“We’ll throw them out and charge them with the naked klewang!”, said
Jacometti as he advanced at the head of his troops. The major’s actions,
which showed great personal courage, were not in accordance with the
applicable tactical regulations. Those regulations stated that in the event
of combat within a position, the attack must first be halted and only after
order had been restored within the ranks was a counterattack permitted.
It was now a poorly prepared attack, carried out without adequate infor-
mation about the enemy. Jacometti was to pay a high price for his actions.
First he was fired upon by friendly troops, who did not know what he was
doing, and then upon first contact with the German soldiers he was killed.
Other counterattacks also failed. First of all, the 1st company of II-19 RI
(the same battalion which on the night of 11 May had been ordered to
recapture the outposts) was ordered to advance. The execution of this or-
der, however, went wrong. When they approached the passages through
the obstacles in front of the stop line, “(friendly) fire was received to the
extent that the attacking groups took cover and partly crawled back”.31 The
other companies involved in the counterattack did not fare much better.
All these actions even caused a panic among the soldiers on the stop line
and the officers had a hard time keeping the line occupied.
The panic was then increased by the unorthodox actions of the com-
mander of the IIIrd battalion of SS regiment ‘Der Führer’, Obersturmbann-
führer Wäckerle. He had decided to advance as far westwards as possible
after nightfall. Wäckerle was advancing along the Wageningen–Rhenen
road, just as Dutch reinforcements, the IIIrd battalion of the 11th Infantry
Regiment (reserve of the IInd Corps), were taking up their positions on the
stop line. The acting commander of this battalion, Reserve Captain F.R.
van der Spek, later recalled:
While Captain Steenbergen was still checking the positions of his guns, a
few short bursts of fire were heard just in front of me, while at the same time
the Germans came rushing at us, just a few metres away, yelling loudly. After
a short scuffle, a number of my men and I were captured and taken in the
direction of Rhenen.32
Their journey was to end at the joinery works ‘De Stoomhamer’, near a
railway line in the depth. Wäckerle’s group entrenched itself here. In the
course of these events, the Obersturmbannführer, who had two companies
(some three hundred men) with him, had himself been wounded.
Nierstrasz, Operatiën Veldleger, 272.

31 ��
��
32 ��
Statement
��
by F.R. van der Spek, August 1940, in: DC-NIMH, Strijd Nederlands
292 chapter eight
Dutch soldiers resting by the side of the road to Utrecht, on their way back from the
Grebbe Line, 14 May 1940.
As a result of Wäckerle’s actions, the Dutch soldiers on the stop line

now had to contend with enemy troops in front and to the rear. For many
of them, this was just too much and “in a wild flight” soldiers streamed
down the Grebbeberg towards Rhenen. The latter could only be reached,
however, by means of a viaduct across the railway line and here stood
Marechaussee Captain G.J.W. Gelderman, who with all his might tried
to stop the fleeing soldiers. “The majority were no longer obeying orders,
however, and rushed on in disarray.” In the end, Gelderman even opened
fire on the deserters, which cost the lives of some twenty Dutch soldiers.33
The Dutch counterattacks, carried out without direct artillery support
and without every single commander on the Grebbeberg having been in-
formed, ended in a fiasco. Only the stop line remained in Dutch hands.
The various sections positioned there, however, had no idea as to their
situation. For the third time, the soldiers who had already been put to the
test were faced with a night of uncertainty.
33 ��
W.
��
Gelderman, “Verslag omtrent het optreden van een detachement Koninklijke
��
Marechaussee op de Grebbeberg”, 31 May 1940, in: Enquêtecommissie Regeringsbeleid. Deel
Ib (The Hague, 1949) 167-168; Statement by Royal Netherlands Marechaussee Captain
G.J.W. Gelderman, 1 July 1940, in: DC-NIMH, Strijd Nederlands Grondgebied, box 502,
file 14.
Chaos among the military leadership
How had the leadership of the IInd Corps experienced the events of 12
May and what measures did they take? During the morning, Harberts had
been busy installing a drumhead court martial. That court martial was to
try a case of desertion. The case against Ensign Tack had offered too few
leads to proceed with the prosecution, so therefore Harberts’ eye fell on
Sergeant J.C. Meijer. The corps commander appointed Major G. Geel as
the president of the court martial and Captain J. Greter and Reserve Lieu-
tenant H. Witte as its members. Harberts gave a speech at the installation
of the court martial, in which he demanded, in so many words, the death
penalty for Sergeant Meijer.
I considered it absolutely necessary, because I realised that the officers of our
peacetime training, trained with the mentality of, to use the popular phrase,
‘a soft-boiled egg’, might be reluctant to sentence that soldier to death.34
Military judge advocate Plugge responded quickly to this attempt by Har-

berts to influence the court martial. He urged its members to make their
judgement with sincerity and impartiality. Even though they took Plugge’s
remark to heart, however, it was no longer possible for them to approach
the case with an open mind. What precisely was the issue at hand here?
Sergeant J.C. Meijer, of the 19th Antitank-gun Company, had, as section
commander, had command of two antitank guns on the front line in the
sector of II-8 RI. All he had had at his disposal were antitank shells and as
no tanks had appeared it meant his section had had to stand idly by while
the outposts were cleared up. They too had come under artillery fire, caus-
ing Meijer to lose all contact with his superior officers. As was the case
at so many locations on the Grebbeberg, partly as a result of the artillery
shelling, the unrest among the men increased and, under pressure, Meijer
decided without consultation to retreat. “I’d rather go back than have us
shot dead here”, he said.
At issue here was the second paragraph of Article 84 of the Military Pe-
nal Code. That paragraph stipulated that anyone who in wartime deliber-
ately “vacates or leaves the place, post or vessel of the armed forces under
his command without consultation and unnecessarily” could be sentenced
to death, or a maximum prison sentence of twenty years. At the inquest,
Meijer had admitted to military judge advocate Plugge that he had left his
post. When the court martial began at 12.30 hrs, the prosecution therefore
demanded the death penalty. For the defence, conducted by Captain J.C.C.
Testimony of J. Harberts, 16 June 1948, in: Enquêtecommissie Regeringsbeleid. Deel
34 ��
��
Ic, 444.
IV th Corps 12 mei
May 1940
1940
XXX
XX XX
7 8 1 1 9 1 18 3 15
5 2 18
7 5 (-)
18 16 (-)
21 20 *)
1 42 5 (-)
20
1 (-) 3 1
3 5 3 18
7 8
19
1 7 1 8
*) 20RI was originally part of the VII th Division, but had

3 (-) 8 been withdrawn from that division and had become
Corps reserve.
III-20RI was then tasked with guarding Soesterberg
7 8 airfield and II-20 RI was made available on 10 May
1940 to the Commander of Fortress Holland. I-20 RI
defended fortified Woudenberg, a junction of roads on
the sector boundary between the IInd and IV th Corps.
Brigade B as reserve of the Field Army from 12 May 1940
24 1 29 3 4 10 10
3
van Erp, there was of course little to be gained in this situation. Van Erp
was at a disadvantage to start with, as he was an “officer with knowledge
of law”, whereas the prosecution was a fully qualified lawyer. The court
martial needed over half an hour to form its judgement. The case was such
“that the general opinion was that the only response to the sergeant’s ac-
tions was the death penalty”.35 The trial, which thus came to an end, had
been conducted entirely according to regulations. The sentence was con-
firmed by General Harberts not long after. Then, after having spoken with
a chaplain for just twenty minutes and having written two farewell letters,
Meijer was executed immediately at a firing range near Doorn.
Although the trial and the sentence were not in breach of the law, there
had still been a degree of carelessness in terms of procedure. First of all
there were of course the questionable actions of General Harberts. He
underestimated the German attack on the Grebbeberg and assumed that
the imminent collapse of the Dutch front was the result of a lack of fight-
ing spirit among the troops. In order to remedy this he wanted to “make
an example of someone”, whereby the actual individual who was accused
was of no consequence. To this end, Harberts attempted to influence the
court martial, thus going beyond his authority. Not the corps commander,
however, but the court martial was responsible for Meijer’s conviction.
The court martial gave only scant grounds for the sentence. In view of the
complete lack of experience of the newly appointed court martial, and the
circumstances of war, this was not entirely surprising. What is regrettable
is that no further grounds for the sentence were given in what was a par-
ticularly complicated case.
Meijer’s execution hardly tempered Harberts’ anger at all. Later that
morning of 12 May, he was driven to the command post of the division
commander, Colonel Van Loon. The corps commander arrived there “ter-
ribly upset and yelling and screaming about cowards who had let them-
selves be thrown out by a bunch of schoolboys” and demanded that Van
Loon have the retreated troops conduct a counterattack. (The latter then
went personally to get weapons for that counterattack, which meant that
he could not be contacted for four hours.) Harberts then left for the com-
mander of the 8th Infantry Regiment, Lieutenant Colonel Hennink, whom
he, “openly and in a loud voice”, called “the commander of the regiment
of cowards, whose outposts had run away upon the enemy’s approach”.36
C.H. Beekhuis, “Beïnvloeding van leden van een krijgsraad?”, Nederlands Juristen-
35 ��
��
blad, XXXII (1967) 823.
Testimony of A.A.M. van Loon, 1 July 1948, in: Enquêtecommissie Regeringsbeleid,
36 ��
��
Deel Ic, 518.
296 chapter eight
After that, Harberts went to the headquarters of the Commander of the

Field Army at Zeist. By then it was around 13.00 hrs, and the Germans
were commencing their attack on the Grebbeberg, unbeknown to Har-
berts and Van Voorst tot Voorst. Van Loon knew nothing about it either;
he was still on his way with the weapons for the counterattack.
After Harberts had arrived back at his own command post, at 14.35 hrs
he “suddenly, out of the blue” received a report from Colonel Van Loon
that “a number of casemates on the front line had been taken by the Ger-
mans”. This report made a great impression on the corps commander. He
wondered whether the troops on the front line would now also give way
“without putting up adequate resistance”.37 Harberts therefore ordered the
casemates to be recaptured and made the 4th Hussars Regiment, led by
Lieutenant Colonel jonkheer S.M.S.A.A. de Marees van Swinderen, avail-
able to Van Loon.
Lieutenant General Van Voorst tot Voorst had plans of his own, howev-
er, and planned a counterattack without consulting Harberts. This strange
approach is understandable if we realise that even during the mobilisa-
tion the relations between the Commander of the Field Army and the
commander of the IInd Corps were very strained. First of all, Van Voorst
tot Voorst ordered Colonel J.C.C. Nijland, the commander of Brigade B,
which was from the Land van Maas en Waal area, to advance on Rhenen
“with all available forces” in order to halt the enemy advance. In addition,
the commander of the IInd Division, Colonel J.S. Barbas, was to conduct
a counterattack with reserve units. This reserve force consisted of two
battalions, II-11 RI (reserve of the IInd Division) and I-20 RI (reserve of
the IVth Corps) and served “in order to be certain that the enemy” would
be thrown from the Grebbeberg “with the greatest impetus”. It was to be
commanded by two regiment commanders, Lieutenant Colonel P.J. van
den Briel (10th Infantry Regiment) and Lieutenant Colonel J.F. de Ridder
(22nd Infantry Regiment). Overall command of the counterattack, includ-
ing the operations of Brigade B, was given to Colonel Barbas, passing over
General Harberts entirely. This course of events can only be explained as
a consequence of the extremely frosty relations between Van Voorst tot
Voorst and Harberts during the mobilisation period.
This time Van Voorst tot Voorst had gone too far, however. Harberts
phoned him in a rage and informed him: “I have cancelled your order to
Colonel Barbas”. Harberts wanted Colonel Van Loon to be tasked with the
coordination of the counterattack, which was not a bad idea. The Com-
mander of the Field Army had, after all, acted on impulse. Although a
37 ��
Harberts,
��
“Gereconstrueerd dagboek over de dagen 10 t/m 14 mei 1940”.
quick and effective counterattack was required, Van Voorst tot Voorst had
intervened without knowing what the subordinate commanders had al-
ready decided. He had given command to a division commander who was
not familiar with the situation in the area of operations of the IVth Division.
Lieutenant General Van Voorst tot Voorst submitted to Harberts’ de-
cision. The latter in turn postponed the counterattack; first the Germans
were to be halted by Van Loon and then “all German troops which had
penetrated (…) were to be destroyed (…) using all available troops”. The
details of this order were left to the commander of the IVth Division, who
did not even know which troops of the IInd Division and Brigade B were
available.
Van Loon seemed unable to cope with the situation. In his overcrowd-
ed command post, exhausted and without a detailed military map, he
was unable to formulate orders. Relief arrived in the person of Captain
A.H.J.L. Fiévez of the General Staff, who had been sent by Van Voorst tot
Voorst. He took over the tasks of Van Loon’s Chief of Staff, Captain G.J. Le
Fèvre de Montigny, who said: “that he had not rested in a very long time
and was no longer able to think straight”. Fiévez did not have much insight
into the situation either, but from the reports coming in he deduced that a
threatening situation had arisen which required forceful counteraction. A
counterattack “from Achterberg in a south-easterly direction (…) under
the command of Lieutenant Colonel Land” was necessary.38 At 22.00 hrs,
the order was ready: the attack would commence at 04.30 hrs (the troops
had been told the Royal Air Force was to carry out a bombing raid at that
time), with the purpose of recapturing the front line. Four battalions had
been designated, II-24 RI, I-29 RI and III-29 RI of Brigade B and I-20 RI,
the unit which originally had defended the crossroads at Woudenberg on
the boundary between the sectors of the IInd and IVth Corps.
When the order was ready, however, Lieutenant Colonel Hennink sud-
denly phoned. Fiévez was surprised; “as far as he knew, all of the 8th Infan-
try Regiment had been dispersed, disbanded and had disappeared”. It was
too late, however, to include this regiment in the equation; the counterat-
tack was to pass right through its positions. Fiévez therefore just advised
Hennink to “have his remaining troops take cover in the trenches and shel-
ters during the counterattack”. The captain then left for General Harberts,
38 ��
��
Lieutenant Colonel G. Land was the commander of the 29th Infantry Regiment,
which was part of Brigade B.
Dutch soldier killed at the Grebbe Line, 14 May 1940.
Staged scene of a street fight. In the foreground is a Dutch 47mm antitank gun.
whom he found “in a very serious mood and very much affected by the
events”. 13 May was to be a decisive day.39
The fall of the Grebbe Line
On the evening of 12 May, the German attack on the Grebbeberg had

resulted in a strong bridgehead west of the Grift. Responsible for this
achievement was SS regiment ‘Der Führer’, which had now been in action
for 48 hours. Division commander Karl von Tiedeman therefore decided
on a change of echelon. For the first time since the beginning of the cam-
paign, he deployed an infantry regiment from his own division, the 322nd,
led by Oberst Fritz Neidholdt. On the night on 12 May, the 322nd Infantry
Regiment took over the positions of the SS regiment on the Grebbeberg.
Two battalions of the regiment would push through to Rhenen the next
day. The SS regiment was given a new task. Now that the Germans had
control of the high ground on the Grebbeberg, part of the terrain to the
north, the Achterbergse Hooilanden, was no longer under Dutch fire. The
SS regiment was to attack in a north-westerly direction, through this ter-
rain, also with two battalions. After they had taken the village of Achter-
berg, the SS troops would rejoin the rest of the division west of Rhenen.
But first, as a result of the measures taken by General Harberts, they
would find themselves directly in the path of the Dutch counterattack.
There were problems with this counterattack right from the start. For
instance, it proved impossible to have the four battalions ready in time. At
02.40 hrs, not a single battalion commander had reported to Lieutenant
Colonel Land yet. Thereupon the latter asked the commander of the IVth
Division, Colonel van Loon whether the time of the attack could be post-
poned. The division commander gave him just fifteen minutes’ respite,
which was by no means long enough. Not until 06.30 hrs and 07.00 hrs,
respectively, did the Ist and IIIrd battalions of the 29th Infantry Regiment
arrive at the starting position. The other two battalions were even later. It
was after seven when the troops advanced in south-easterly direction. The
advance guard on the right, commanded by Reserve Captain Th.C. Vrolijk,
was formed by I-29 RI and the advance guard on the left, commanded by
Reserve Major G. Schotman, by III-29 RI.
39 ��
A.H.J.L.
��
Fiévez, “Verslag betreffende de vervulling van de mij door den C.V. ver-
strekte opdracht in verband met den bevolen tegenaanval bij Rhenen”, 20 May 1940 [Bijlage
III bij het Dagboek van het Hoofdkwartier van het Veldleger], in: DC-NIMH, Strijd Neder-
lands Grondgebied, box 494-1.
300 chapter eight
The soldiers of these battalions were hardly prepared for their im-
portant task. Not only were they lacking good maps of the area through
which they were to advance, they had been on the move since 11 May and
had hardly had a proper meal or any rest. Furthermore, the battalions—
from ‘high-numbered’ regiments—mainly consisted of “fathers aged be-
tween 30 and 35 with no combat experience, who might be useful in a

properly defensible position, but were absolutely unsuitable to conduct an
attack”.40
In addition, the promised RAF bombing raid had not materialised,
nor had proper fire support from the artillery. Four Dutch light bomb-
ers, Fokker C-Xs, escorted by five Fokker D-XXI fighter aircraft, had car-
ried out an attack on the German positions, but had not inflicted much
damage. It was the only support that was to be expected for the Dutch
counterattack. Van Voorst tot Voorst therefore informed the air defence
commander, Lieutenant General P.W. Best, that “the bombing raid had
provided relief ” and asked for it to be repeated. Best refused. The condi-
tion of the materiel and the airmen’s tiredness rendered a new attack im-
possible. When the Commander of the Field Army was informed of this
decision, he decided to appeal personally to the air defence commander.
The situation at the Grebbeberg was critical and the future of the entire
Field Army was at stake. General Best thereupon promised to help and
ordered what aircraft of the 1st Aviation Regiment were still available to be
prepared and to be crewed by volunteers.
This order was passed on to the commander of the Strategic Recon-
naissance Aircraft Section, Captain J. van der Werf. He told his men that,
in view of the gravity of the situation, a new bombing raid was neces-
sary. His words made an impression; everyone offered to volunteer. Thus
at 11.00 hrs four Fokker C-Xs, commanded by Reserve Second Lieuten-
ant S.J. Postma and protected by five D-XXIs of the 1st Fighter Aircraft
Section of Reserve Captain H.M. Schmidt Crans, embarked on a peril-
ous journey. The airmen included Reserve Sergeant A.F. Postma, Reserve
Sergeant B. de Beus, Reserve Second Lieutenant R.B. Lewis and Reserve
Second Lieutenant F.C. Bik, all of whom would later be decorated for their
efforts. Once they had reached the Grebbeberg, they dropped thirty-two
50-kg bombs on the road from Wageningen to Rhenen, after which they
used their machine guns to enter the ground battle.41
The air support was the only ray of hope for the Dutch troops carrying
out the counterattack. The exhausted soldiers moved on with lead in their
boots, until they literally came up against the first SS troops. Soon, all co-
hesion was lost on the Dutch side and units were mixed up, resulting in a
total lack of leadership. “It was such a chaos of people from various com-
panies, battalions and regiments that even the officers appeared to have
Lieutenant J. Hogenhout in: L. de Jong, Het Koninkrijk der Nederlanden in de

40 ��
��
Tweede Wereldoorlog. Deel 3 Mei ’40 (The Hague, 1970) 339.
F.J. Molenaar, De luchtverdediging mei 1940 (The Hague, 1970) 197-200 and 297-302.
41 ��
��
302 chapter eight
no control over their people anymore.”42 From 12.30 hrs, the first Dutch
soldiers began to retreat. The retreat became almost complete when from
13.30 hrs Stukas began carrying out dive-bombing raids. The commander
of the Ist battalion of the 29th Infantry Regiment, Captain Vrolijk, tried to
stop the fleeing masses. To his “great dismay”, however, he had to con-
clude that “what was happening here could not be described as a ‘retreat’,
but should rather be referred to as a frantic flight”.43 Hundreds of soldiers
were moving westwards, to save their skins. The counterattack was a com-
plete failure.
The latter was by no means a certainty as far as the commander of the
IInd Corps, General Harberts, was concerned, however. He ordered Lieu-
tenant Colonel Land to continue the counterattack “immediately and with
maximum force and speed”. According to the general, the Germans were
“rather weak, but bold and energetic”.44 In fact, there were four German
battalions attacking on and near the Grebbeberg, some 3,000 men, which
put Harberts’ remark in a rather strange perspective. Lieutenant Colonel
Land only had 400 or 500 men left, “largely unarmed and demoralised”,
which meant that a new attack was out of the question. The Dutch sol-
diers fighting on the Grebbeberg could therefore expect no further sup-
port from the north.
As has been said before, the troops defending the stop line were faced
with the German 322nd Infantry Regiment, of which the Ist battalion was
advancing to the north of the Wageningen–Rhenen road, and the IIIrd bat-
talion to the south. The stop line was occupied by parts of the Ist battalion
of the 8th Infantry Regiment, reinforced by one company of the 19th and
part of a company of the 11th Infantry Regiment. South of the road, facing
the advancing Germans, were the remnants of the 3rd company of the I-8
RI, led by Reserve Captain P.F. Brittijn. The company was exhausted due
to the tension and the lack of sleep. Brittijn sent two officers to his battal-
ion commander, Major Landzaat, to request reinforcements. There were
no longer any reinforcements available, however.
The German attack came at dawn on 13 May. At first, the attack was
repelled; it took the Germans a second attempt to succeed. The German
infantry managed to pass through the northern part of the battalion sec-
tor, after which they could attack the rest of the stop line from the rear.
After a morning of battle, at 13.00 hrs the first defenders began to divert
42 ��
Th.
��
C. Vrolijk, “Verslag der krijgsverrichtingen van 10 t/m 14 mei ’40”, in: DC-
43 �Ibidem.
44 ��
Nierstrasz,
German infantry passing the bodies of Dutch soldiers in Rhenen, on the road to Wageningen.
The demolished railway viaduct at Rhenen.

304 chapter eight
to the south. Panic threatened in the ranks. “A sergeant major of a compa-

ny that had been beaten back, who was shell-shocked, had climbed on to
the parapet and was shot back down; as he fell back into the trench, badly
wounded, he urged the men to flee.”45 There was no longer any question of
a coordinated defence. Several commanders were working at cross-pur-
poses. While Captain Brittijn was already giving his men permission to
retreat, the soldiers led by Ensign F.J.L. in den Bosch in particular were
still putting up fierce resistance. Eventually, the company could no longer
hold out, and retreated towards the Rhine.
North of the Wageningen–Rhenen road, 2-III-8 RI was still managing
to hold its ground in the trenches. The Germans shelling was so heavy,
however, that without artillery support, by 10.00 hrs it was all but impos-
sible to defend the positions. No artillery support was provided. After
all, it might hit the battalions carrying out the counterattack. “Hold your
ground, the counterattack is imminent!”, one of the section commanders,
Reserve Lieutenant P. van den Boom, said to encourage his men. The Ger-
man fire was terrible, however. “Incredible, this hell. We’ve never seen it
this bad before”, Van den Boom later said.46 In this situation, there was
no stopping it, despite the brave efforts of some, such as Private Th.M.
Chotzen. This part of the stop line, too, had to throw in the towel.
Now the command post of Major Landzaat, the commander of the Ist
battalion of the 8th Infantry Regiment, situated directly behind the stop
line, was surrounded. The major had said on several occasions, even dur-
ing the mobilisation period, that to him the defence of the Grebbe Line
meant standing firm, no matter what the cost. Landzaat therefore abso-
lutely did not want to surrender and he personally organised the defence
of his command post, situated in the grounds of Ouwehands Zoo. The
Germans brought in heavy machine guns and an artillery gun, but not
until the Dutch soldiers had run out of ammunition did Landzaat give his
men permission to leave the command post. “You have fought as heroes, I
thank you”, he said.47 He himself considered it necessary to literally stand
his ground to the end. The pavilion was shot to pieces. After the battle,
all that would be found were the charred remains of the major, under the
rubble at the side of the building were the attack had come from.
45 ��
F.J.L.
��
in den Bosch, “Verslag 10 mei t/m 14 mei 1940”, 10 February 1947, in: DC-
46 ��
��
“Ervaringen Grebbeberg van lt. P. v.d. Boom”, 9 December 1940, in: DC-NIMH,
47 ��
��
Reserve Captain A.G. Höpink, “Verslag van de verdediging van het gebouw ge-
naamd ‘Het Paviljoentje’ op den Grebbeberg op Maandagmorgen 13 Mei 1940”, in: DC-
Further north still of the Grebbeberg, the Dutch soldiers were not far-
ing much better. Once the Germans had breached part of the stop line,
they were able to attack the other parts of the line from the rear and elim-
inate them. At the end of the afternoon, the command post of Reserve
Captain J. van den Berg, Jacometti’s successor as commander of the IInd
battalion of the 8th Infantry Regiment, was also surrounded. He had no
other option but to surrender.
That left the command post of Lieutenant Colonel Hennink. He too
knew full well that the fight was over. “I have written a farewell to my wife
and children on a card and, having consigned myself to death, I feel com-
pletely calm”, he remarked at the end of the aftermoon.48 Hennink would
not think of surrendering, however. After dark, he gave the regimental
colour to a sergeant and a private, who took it to Fortress Holland. Hen-
nink himself moved with his men in the direction of the Rhine, where he
entrenched himself in a brickyard. This would be where he would learn of
the capitulation on 15 May.
The German 322nd Infantry Regiment having thus taken the Grebbe-
berg, it subsequently focused its attack on the Dutch positions west of the
railway line. These positions formed the ‘rear line’ and were the very last
line of defence. Division commander Van Loon had given command of
these troops to the commander of the 4th Hussars Regiment, jonkheer De
Marees van Swinderen. He was ordered to stop the German troops from
crossing the railway line. Van Loon did not, however, inform De Marees
van Swinderen of the situation on the Grebbeberg. In addition, the com-
mander of the Hussars Regiment had had hardly any sleep since 9 May.
This may have contributed to the fact that he did not consult the com-
mander of the IInd battalion of the 19th Infantry Regiment, Major Van
Apeldoorn, who was with him and who was better abreast of the situa-
tion. As befits a hussar, De Marees van Swinderen did not order his men
to take up fixed positions, convinced as he was that a mobile defence was
best. When he received the (incorrect) report that one of his squadrons
had been attacked, he decided to position his regiment near Elst, instead
of staying at the railway line as Colonel van Loon had intended. All that
remained on the rear line were a few infantry units, parts of the 1st squad-
ron of the 4th Hussars Regiment and Captain Gelderman’s group. They
thwarted two attempts by Wäckerle and his men to cross the railway line
from the joinery works. The Germans thereupon called in the Luftwaffe.
At around 13.30 hrs, 27 Stukas bombed the rear line. “The effect was suc-
48 ��
Lieutenant
��
Colonel W.F. Hennink, “Dagboek van C.-8 R.I. over het tijdvak 9 t/m 16
mei 1940 (gereconstrueerd)”, in: DC-NIMH, Strijd Nederlands Grondgebied, box 506, file 20.
Recording at SS regiment ‘Der Führer’ for German radio, after the breach of the Grebbe Line.
Hauptsturmführer O. Kumm (second from the left) of the IIIrd battalion is speaking.
Dutch prisoners of war after the battle at the Grebbeberg.

cessful. It gave the infantry real relief. Some of the enemy left their posi-
tions in a panic”, according to Kriegstagebuch of the 207th Infantry Divi-
sion.49 And indeed, for many of the Dutch soldiers, the Stuka attack was
too much. They had expected the RAF, and now that this illusion had
been cruelly shattered, they moved westwards en masse. Captain Gelder-
man, who had the viaduct across the railway blown up, was surprised to
find that “only 15 men remained in the entire position; everyone was ap-
parently running off ”.50
It was a hopelessly lost cause. In Elst, General Harberts tried to stop the
fleeing soldiers, with the intention of redeploying them. The command-
er of Brigade B, Colonel Nijland, did the same near Amerongen. It was
to no avail. As Colonel Van Loon later said, the soldiers were “in such a
frame of mind that, had I pointed a gun at their chest with the intention of
shooting, they would have been fine with it. They were exhausted.”51 The
entire IVth Division was moving westwards in a disorderly fashion, along
roads and through woods. The Grebbeberg was well and truly in German
hands. Late that evening, the 322nd Infantry Regiment entered Rhenen.
The price paid for the entire advance by the 207th Infantry Division was
13 officers killed and 205 NCOs and other ranks; 41 men were missing.
More than half of the dead of the division came from SS regiment ‘Der
Führer’: 7 officers and 111 other ranks had been killed and 18 SS soldiers
were missing. On 16 May, the 322nd Infantry Regiment counted 3 offic-
ers dead and 48 NCOs and other ranks, and 20 soldiers missing.52 The
number of casualties was greater on the Dutch side. During the battle for
the Grebbeberg, 18 officers and 344 NCOs and other ranks were killed.
Twenty men were missing. The 8th Infantry Regiment had suffered the
greatest losses: 4 officers and 158 other ranks were killed, and 17 soldiers
were missing.53
49 ��
207.
��
Inf.��
��
Division,
��
Ia, “Kriegstagebuch Nr.��
3. 9.5.1940-31-5.1940”,
��
in: DC-NIMH,
Strijd Nederlands Grondgebied, box 550.
50 ��
��
Gelderman, “Verslag omtrent het optreden van een detachement Koninklijke Mare-
chaussee”, 168.
Testimony of A.A.M. van Loon, 1 juli 1948, in: Enquêtecommissie Regeringsbeleid.
51 ��
��
Deel Ic, 519.
52 ��
��
Verliezen 207 Divisie 10-16 mei 1940, in: DC-NIMH, Strijd Nederlands Grondge-
bied, box 559c.
53 ��
��
“Grebbeberg.��
��
Namen van gesneuvelde militairen”, in: DC-NIMH, Strijd Nederlands
Grondgebied, box 610-8.
308 chapter eight
The battle at Scherpenzeel
With the attack on the Grebbeberg, the leadership of the 18th Army were
not putting all their eggs in one basket. If the battle for the Grebbeberg
were not to have the desired result, there was another alternative: Gene-
ralmajor Zickwolff ’s 227th Infantry Division, which had orders to attack
along the Apeldoorn–Amersfoort axis. As has become apparent above,
this division’s advance experienced serious delays. It was not until the af-
ternoon of 12 May that the forward units, Schnelle Gruppe Süd, reinforced
with the IIIrd battalion of the 366th Infantry Regiment, arrived at the Grebbe
Line. They reconnoitred a wide sector from Terschuur, west of Amers-
foort, via Achterveld to Scherpenzeel, although the latter actually lay in
the sector of the 207th Infantry Division. Since the evening of 11 May,
the sector boundary between the two divisions had lain along the Lun-
teren–Scherpenzeel–Zeist line, with Scherpenzeel on the side of the 207th
Infantry Division. The Germans established that the Dutch defence works
looked strong and that due to “an increasingly boggy terrain” an attack
at Amersfoort was not possible. From the headquarters of the 18th Army,
however, von Küchler also demanded an attack by the 227th Infantry Divi-
sion: “On 13 May, the Xth Corps will continue the attack on the Grebbe
Line. Concentration of forces against the centre and southern parts.”54 The
reconnaissance had also taught the division staff that the inundations at
Scherpenzeel did not amount to much. By attacking here, the division
would be able to make a quick gain and make up for the ground it had
lost compared to the 207th Infantry Division. Corps commander Hansen
at first did not want to allow more than a quick strike, or Handstreich.
Generalmajor Zickwolff assigned a battalion for the strike. But when the
attack was cancelled as night was falling on 12 May, and the division com-
mander again insisted to be allowed to change the direction of attack of
his entire division, the corps commander agreed. They would now attack
the next day south of Scherpenzeel, “with a strong concentration of forc-
es” with the purpose of achieving a “breach of the Grebbe Position” and to
push through to Zeist. This meant that the division would veer sharply to
the south from Barneveld in order to arrive in the Renswoude area, which
lay in front of the Dutch position, and Scherpenzeel which was part of
the outpost sector. To this end, Hansen moved the sector boundary be-
tween the 207th Infantry Division and the 227th Infantry Division further
54 ��
Armeeoberkommando
��
18, Abt.��
Ia,
��
“Armeebefehl für den 12.5.1940” in: V.E. Nier-
strasz, Inleiding en algemeen overzicht van de gevechtsdagen van 10-19 mei 1940 (The
Hague, 1957) 298.
south, to a line through Ede, along the Arnhem–Utrecht railway line at

De Klomp, and on through the Emmikhuizer Berg.
The Dutch positions near these villages were defended by regiments of
Barbas’ IInd Division, namely the 15th Infantry Regiment (in the north),
the 22nd Infantry Regiment (in the centre) and the 10th Infantry Regiment
(in the south). The division was supported by seven artillery battalions.
As was the case at the Grebbeberg, at first there was great unrest among
the infantry regiments. A number of units of the IInd battalion of the 10th
Infantry Regiment, a battalion which, led by Major J.A. Claesen, occupied
the outposts in part of the Grebbe Line, had retreated in a panic on 12
May when the 368th Infantry Regiment of the 207th Infantry Division had
commenced an attack along the road from Ede to De Klomp. The German
regiment was part of the corps reserve, and on 11 May it had received or-
ders to advance to Ede and to prepare there for deployment either on the
Grebbeberg or at Veenendaal. The attack of 12 May was therefore not or-
310 chapter eight
dered, but was a personal initiative of regiment commander Oberst Carl

von Oesterreich and had to be aborted immediately when division com-
mander von Tiedeman was informed. The regiment was not to become
tied down in battle, because it would then no longer be available to the
corps commander. The Dutch officers made use of the break to restore
cohesion in the ranks.
On the night of 12 May, Generalmajor Zickwolff ordered the attack on
13 May. The Valley Position was to be breached between Scherpenzeel
and De Groep. On the right, two battalions of the 366th Infantry Regiment
would attack at Scherpenzeel, reinforced with a battalion of the 328th In-
fantry Regiment and a number of other units. The 412th Infantry Regiment
would attack on the left. Through the centre of the breach sector ran a
small river, the Luntersche Beek, which formed the sector boundary be-
tween the two regiments. The division commander held the other two bat-
talions of the 328th Infantry Regiment in reserve in the woods east of Lun-
teren. Almost seven artillery battalions provided support to the division.
The regiments were to commence the attack at 08.00 hrs on 13 May.
They did not make it on time, however. In Barbas’ IInd Division, the co-
operation between the infantry commanders and the artillery proceeded
according to plan. Communications worked, the requested fire was deliv-
ered promptly and in the right locations. This considerably delayed the
preparations of the German infantry. During the night and the following
morning on 13 May, the Dutch artillery also had fire superiority. The Ger-
man battalions were still advancing and were having difficulties passing
through Barneveld. The village was under heavy artillery fire and there
was congestion on this junction of roads. Not until 13.25 hrs, five and a
half hours later than the time in the order, did the infantry attack com-
mence. A large part of the day had been lost to preparations. The attack by
the 207th Infantry Division on the outposts at the Grebbeberg on 11 May
had had six hours’ more daylight. And there, the Germans had needed the
whole day to reach their objective.
The German side was without SS regiment ‘Adolf Hitler’. According to
plan, this regiment had already been moved towards Noord-Brabant on
11 May. As a result, the German attack was carried out even more cau-
tiously than that on the Grebbeberg. One need only make the comparison
with the unorthodox actions of Wäckerle’s group.
During the course of the afternoon, it became clear that the German
attack plan was based on an incorrect assumption, due to the pressure of
time. Although the 366th Infantry Regiment succeeded in capturing Scher-
penzeel, it did not continue the attack on the front line. The Dutch artillery
German soldiers in the Marktstraat in Scherpenzeel after the capture of the battered village.
Wageningen suffered extensive damage during the battle for the Grebbeberg.
312 chapter eight
fire and the obstacles prevented it, but the regiment also wanted to wait
until the 412th Infantry Regiment appeared at the front line. The latter unit,
however, had run into huge trouble due to flanking fire from the Dutch
outposts. Unlike the positions at the Grebbeberg, these positions afford-
ed the Dutch troops a free field of fire. In addition, various landmines did
their devastating jobs and, again, the Dutch artillery kept its end up.
Zickwolff had not acknowledged that the axis of advance of the 412th
Infantry Regiment was not a frontal attack on the Dutch position, but ran
practically parallel to it. The division did not have proper insight into the
positions of the Dutch outposts, because they were indicated only very
roughly on the German maps. The previous day’s reconnaissance, in ter-
rain that at that time was not yet in the division’s sector, had not made up
for this. In addition, the effect of the artillery on the Dutch outposts had
proved insufficient. In these circumstances, the 412th Infantry Regiment
began by securing its flank. To this end, the reserve battalion attacked
two strong points in the outposts of the Dutch 22nd Infantry Regiment,
the Ravenhorst and Klein Ravenhorst farms, the former of which was
the only one which was occupied. After darkness had set in, the situation
threatened to get even more out of hand. Zickwolff deployed the division
reserve, to extend his flank even further eastwards:
The pressure on the left flank is mounting (…) so much that, besides the IInd
battalion of the 328th Infantry Regiment, parts of the IIIrd battalion of the
328th Infantry Regiment must be deployed to protect the flank.
The division’s strength was thus split up and moved further and further
away from the objective of the attack. In order to understand Zickwolff ’s
concern, we must realise that he considered the previous day’s repelled at-
tack by the 368th Infantry Regiment at De Klomp as proof of the strength
of the Dutch outposts. As a result, in his view the division’s entire left
flank was exposed and there was no physical cohesion with the 207th In-
fantry Division, operating further south-east. He did not know that this
action had been a personal initiative by Oberst Carl von Oesterreich. He
thought that, from a military-technical point of view, there was a danger-
ous ‘dephasing’ taking place between the two divisions. In the end, Zick-
wolff aborted the operation in order “to make the units available again for
the breach of the Grebbe Line on 14 May.”55 The attack would now con-
centrate on Scherpenzeel.
55 ��
227. ��
Inf.-Division, Ia, “Kriegstagebuch Nr.��
2,
��
1.1.194-30.6.1940.”, in: DC-NIMH,
Strijd Nederlands Grondgebied, box 559a.
The Dutch troops had succeeded in repelling the attack mounted in the
afternoon by two entire German regiments. The cooperation between the
infantry and the artillery had been excellent and there had been no panic.
The IInd Division was spared the confusing battles in the main resistance
sector which had caused Van Loon’s division on the Grebbeberg to col-
lapse. “The position is still fully intact, morale among the troops is excel-
lent and we are continuing to keep the upper hand over the attacker”, the
journal of the 15th Infantry Regiment concluded with satisfaction.56 The
IInd Division had lost 44 men, including 3 officers.
Elsewhere, the Field Army had also successfully repelled the German
attacks. At Ochten, on the river Waal, on 13 May, Brigade A repelled a mi-
nor attack by around 200 German infantry soldiers. At Rhenen, however,
where the point of main effort of the attack was, the Germans did succeed
in breaching the Grebbe Line.
The end
When Lieutenant General Van Voorst tot Voorst was informed on 12 May
that the 8th Infantry Regiment’s front line had fallen into German hands,
he was well aware that if the Grebbe Line were indeed breached there,
the entire line would have to be vacated, otherwise the Field Army would
run the risk of being surrounded from the south. That same evening, the
Commander of the Field Army therefore had a number of ‘personal direc-
tives’ for the retreat drawn up, although he still trusted “that the troops
of the Field Army would hold their ground in the currently occupied
positions”.57
As we have seen, the events of the next day went particularly badly for
the Dutch army. At around 14.00 hrs, Major General Harberts reported to
Van Voorst tot Voorst that the situation at the IVth Division had become
“very critical”. During the course of the afternoon it became clear that the
counterattack had ended in a fiasco and that the defence of the railway
line at Rhenen had collapsed. Van Voorst tot Voorst thereupon had a mes-
sage sent to his corps commanders that the Field Army was to retreat be-
hind the New Dutch Waterline at 20.30 hrs, under cover of the outposts
or similar units, and that the headquarters of the Field Army would be
moved to Gouda.
56 ��
��
“Dagboek 15 R.I. gedurende het tijdvak van 10-15 mei”, in: DC-NIMH, Strijd Ne-
derlands Grondgebied, box 505, file 1.
Nierstrasz, Operatiën Veldleger, 73.
57 ��
��
German military personnel inspected the battlefield after the Dutch capitulation.
Here they are shown visiting the hornwork at the Grebbe sluice.
Panzerkampfwagen IV on its way to the Grebbeberg.

The retreat took place in a reasonably orderly fashion. The Field Army
was fortunate that there was mist to the east of Utrecht on the morning
of 14 May. The Luftwaffe was therefore unable to observe or disrupt the
retreat. In the north, the movement of troops was the most successful; to
the south it was the shaken and demoralised parts of the IVth Division and
Brigade B which were moving westwards. Here, there was no cohesion
whatsoever, weapons were left behind and columns became mixed up.
The Field Army retreated behind the New Dutch Waterline, a defence
line which had a legendary-sounding name, but which in 1940 existed
largely on paper only. Hardly any of the inundation areas, which formed
the core of the line, had been flooded. There was little opportunity to
flood them now. The water levels in the major rivers were relatively low
and the water only rose slowly. In addition, on the eastern front of For-
tress Holland, there were hardly any trenches, casemates or machine-gun
nests. After all, before the retreat, the line had been almost entirely unoc-
cupied. The Field Army would therefore only be able to mount an impro-
vised defence.
In this defence, the IInd Corps would no longer be commanded by Ma-
jor General Harberts. A broken man, he had arrived at his new headquar-
ters at Jaarsveld, unable to understand why his troops had failed. There
was no longer any energy left in him. To Colonel Barbas, the commander
of the IInd Division, he said: “tomorrow there will no longer be a IInd Corps
and the day after there will be no field army. I will be dead then, because
the troops will mutiny”.58 Towards the end of the morning, Harberts was
replaced by Barbas.
It took the commander of the 227th Infantry Division a while to dis-
cover that the Dutch troops were retreating. As the Dutch artillery had
shelled a number of locations, including Scherpenzeel, during the night
of 13 May, Generalmajor Zickwolff even concluded “that the enemy would
defend the Grebbe Line to the utmost”.59 It was not until 09.00 hrs that
the Germans discovered that the Dutch positions had been vacated. It
still took until late in the afternoon for the 227th Infantry Division to give
chase; they were much hindered by landmines and demolished bridges.
Generalleutnant von Tiedeman, commander of the 207th Infantry Divi-
sion, noticed sooner that the Field Army was moving westwards. When
the 322nd Infantry Regiment entered Rhenen at 21.00 hrs, all became clear.
58 ��
Bijlage
��
3. Behorende bij de memorie dd.��
30
��
juni 1949 van luitenant-generaal b.d.
J.J.G. baron van Voorst tot Voorst, in: DC-NIMH, Strijd Nederlands Grondgebied, box 494,
file 3a.
59 ��
227.
��
Inf.-Division,
��
Ia, “Kriegstagebuch Nr.��
2. 1.1.194-30.6.1940.
��”
316 chapter eight
Before they could give chase, however, the viaduct across the railway had
to be repaired. It was therefore after midnight when the 322nd Infantry
Regiment and the SS regiment advanced towards Doorn and Zeist. Part
of the latter regiment, however, went in a different direction. It advanced
along the Lower Rhine to Wijk bij Duurstede. The other regiments of the
division moved westwards along a wide front. The 374th, led by Oberst K.
Klemm, reached Nederlangbroek; the 368th led by Oberst von Oesterreich,
reached Driebergen. They did not have to enter into a new confrontation
with the Field Army; General Winkelman capitulated on 14 May.
Conclusion
The Dutch Field Army suffered a decisive defeat on the Grebbeberg. Re-
sponsible for that defeat was Generalleutnant Karl von Tiedeman’s 207th
Infantry Division, reinforced with the SS regiment, which had defeated
the Dutch IInd Corps. If we ask the question why this corps, and thus the
Field Army, lost the battle, four factors can be identified: material and
physical, psychological, organisational and tactical.
First the material and physical factors. This does not immediately re-
fer to the better weapons of the German troops. It is true that they were
better armed, for instance they had much lighter automatic weapons than
the Dutch and more and better artillery guns, but this was not a decisive
factor. What was more important was how these assets were used. The ter-
rain of the outposts at the Grebbeberg, for instance, gave an advantage to
the attacker. There were of course the many trees, hedges and sheds which
were an uncertain factor for the SS troops and which meant they attacked
cautiously, but these obstacles provided the Germans with so much cover
that they were able to take many of the sections in the outposts by sur-
prise and eliminate them.
When establishing the Dutch positions, the assumption had been that
there would only be a frontal attack. They had not reckoned with the pos-
sibility of attacks from the rear. In addition, the various positions had
not yet been completed and the some of the weapons were positioned
such that their crews could not get any Germans in their fields of fire. As
a result, on the Grebbeberg for instance, they were unable to fire on the
German troops on the hollow road. The most important material factor
leading to the Dutch defeat, however, was the vulnerability of the com-
munications between the various commanders in the Grebbeberg area.
If there was an artillery bombardment of any magnitude, the communi-
cations failed. Not only did this mean the senior commanders were in-
formed insufficiently of the developments, but the artillery in particular

was not able to support the infantry adequately, which was of great con-
sequence for the outcome of the battle. After all, the German artillery did
operate effectively, so that the attack was conducted by the book.
Secondly, psychological factors can also be identified which contributed
to the defeat of the IInd Corps. In general, the attacker has the psychological
advantage. After all, his objective is a positive one, for instance the capture
of a certain area or the defeat of an opponent. On the other hand, the de-
fender’s only assignment is to stand his ground, and if he completes that
assignment, he is faced with the same task again the next day. This was in-
deed the case on the Grebbeberg. The Dutch troops were ordered to mount
a “staunch defence”, but it meant that if they were successful, it would only
prolong the war. In addition, the German troops had the initiative in the
battle, so that the Dutch soldiers had to be prepared for an attack at all
times. There were also the many alarming rumours, which meant that at
every level, the Dutch soldiers hardly had any sleep during the war. It is ev-
ident that the levels of exhaustion were therefore high and that panic easily
broke out during artillery shelling or aerial bombing raids.
Thirdly, there were the organisational factors. Although the Grebbe Line
was a relatively strong defensive work, initially there was a structural short-
age of troops, which meant that there were insufficient reserves. For in-
stance, the entire IInd Corps had only one battalion in reserve. Any breach
of the line would therefore be impossible to handle immediately. On 11
May, the Germans were at an advantage in terms of combat power, both for
the infantry and the artillery. This is in accordance with the military rule
of thumb which states that an attack on a prepared defence requires con-
siderable superiority. The IVth Division was supported by five battalions of
artillery, whereas the fire support of the 207th Infantry Division was around
twice that size. On the Dutch side, six battalions of infantry faced nine bat-
talions of the 207th Infantry Division, reinforced with three battalions of
‘Der Führer’. Over the next few days, however, more and more troops be-
came available in the sector of the IVth Division, so that at the height of the
battle there were thirteen Dutch infantry battalions and a hussars regiment
available, facing fewer than six attacking German battalions. At that point,
there were six artillery battalions deployed on the German side. The prob-
lem by now no longer lay in the actual numbers, but in making effective
use of the numerical superiority. The Dutch commanders failed to do so.
On 12 and 13 May they conducted many small counterattacks, both in suc-
cession and simultaneously, but did not succeed in achieving superiority
anywhere through concentration of resources, let alone a decisive result. In
318 chapter eight
Identification of the Dutch casualties on the Grebbeberg. In the background are civilian
labourers who helped move the bodies and dig the graves.
addition, all too often units lost their cohesion during combat contact and
slipped from the control of their officers, so that they could no longer be
used for subsequent assignments. The fact that the fire support failed was
not so much to be blamed on the number of available guns, but rather on
the failure of communications with the observers, the lack of firing orders
and the shortcomings in command.
A typical example of this situation are the events surrounding Brigade
B. This brigade formed an extensive reserve for the Field Army and op-
erated in the sector of the IVth Division. Before they could be deployed,
however, they had to be moved from the Land van Maas en Waal area
to the Grebbe Line. As a result, these troops were exhausted by the time
they arrived at their new positions on 13 May, which diminished the value
of this reserve, and meant that there was inadequate preparation for the
counterattack, which ended in a fiasco.
The Germans made better use of the troops they had available. For
instance, the 322nd Infantry Regiment, which until that point had hardly
been deployed at all, took over the attack on the Grebbeberg from the SS
regiment, after the latter regiment had established a bridgehead across the
Grift. The battalions of ‘Der Führer’ had subsequently been able to mount
a successful attack in the direction of Achterberg.
Lastly, the most important factors to contribute to the defeat were the
military-tactical errors of judgement. The responsibility in this respect
lay with a number of weak commanders. For instance, the power of the
German troops had been seriously underestimated. On 13 May, Major
General Harberts referred to the Germans as “rather weak, but bold and
energetic”. But even though only little could be done in the way of aerial
reconnaissance as a result of the blow suffered by the Dutch air force on
the first day of the war, the events should have spoken for themselves. One
of the consequences of this underestimation was that counterattacks were
carried out immediately, without preparation, without artillery support
and without everyone having been informed. It did not occur to the de-
fenders to block the attack properly first. To quote Major Jacometti, they
would just “throw them out”, but reality proved different. In addition,
Major General Harberts had become firmly convinced, albeit wrongly so,
that the 8th Infantry Regiment was made up of cowards, which led, among
other things, to the death sentence for Sergeant Meijer. It was not only
Jacometti and Harberts who ordered rash measures to be taken, the Com-
mander of the Field Army, Lieutenant General J.J.G. baron Van Voorst
tot Voorst, was guilty of the same. On 12 May, without knowing what his
subordinate commanders had decided, he wanted to conduct a counter-
attack, giving command to, of all people, someone who was not familiar
with the situation in the area where the attack was to take place. They paid
the price here for the difficult personal relationship between Van Voorst
tot Voorst and Harberts during the mobilisation period.
It should be noted, however, that on the German side all did not go en-
tirely smoothly from a tactical point of view either. Examples are the un-
orthodox actions of Obersturmbannführer Wäckerle, the unauthorised at-
tack by the 368th Infantry Regiment along the road from Ede to De Klomp
ordered by Oberst von Oesterreich and the attack by the 227th Infantry
Division at Scherpenzeel. These events, however, were not decisive. The
German infantry attack on the Grebbeberg, supported by excellent artil-
lery fire, was very successful indeed. The Grebbe Line was breached and
the Dutch Field Army defeated.
CHAPTER NINE
“VORWÄRTS DENKEN, VORWÄRTS SEHEN, VORWÄRTS

REITEN!”: THE BATTLE IN THE NORTHERN PROVINCES
The 1st Cavalry Division is to occupy northern Holland and capture the
north-eastern IJsselmeer Dam. Next, the 1st Cavalry Division could be de-
ployed to form a bridgehead to the west of the IJsselmeer for the attack on
Fortress Holland from the northeast.
This was the Divisionsbefehl for the 1st Cavalry Division, which, com-
manded by Generalmajor Kurt Feldt, crossed the borders of the provinces
of Groningen, Drenthe and north-eastern Overijssel on 10 May.1
The division was viewed as an anachronism by many, even within the
German armed forces themselves. Its core comprised four regiments of
cavalrymen who dismounted at the front and fought as infantrymen. These
modern-day dragoons were the sole propagators of the illustrious cavalry
tradition within the German army. They were strongly bound up in tradi-
tion in other ways too: the officers and NCOs were chiefly from old Prus-
sian military families and the majority of the ranks were recruited from
East Prussia, an area well-known for its horsemanship. Yet the division had
only been created in its present form on 1 November 1939. That was when
it had been decided to expand the 1st Cavalry Brigade, which had earned
its spurs during the campaign in Poland, into the 1st Cavalry Division.
In the second half of November, the fledgling division had been moved
to an assembly point near Ankum, nor far from the Dutch border, as a
result of the order from the Oberkommando des Heeres to Army Group B
“to occupy the province of Groningen using only weak forces”.2 From the
end of November, the division staff had been busy building and training
the unit as well as preparing the assault on the northern Netherlands. As
has already been described in Chapter 4, the German plans of attack were
continually subjected to change during the winter months. This had sev-
eral consequences for the 1st Cavalry Division.
1 1. Kavalleriedivision Ia. No. 42/40, “Divisionsbefehl für das Besetzen Nordhollands”,

6 April 1940, Bundesarchiv-Militärarchiv, Freiburg im Breisgau (BA-MA), RH 29-1/57.
2 Kriegstagebuch No. 1 of Heeresgruppe B, 14 November 1939, in: BA-MA, RH 19 II/18.
Groningen denotes Groningen, Friesland and Drenthe.
322 chapter nine
Horsemen of the 1st Cavalry Division cross one of the Drenthe canals via an existing,
undamaged bridge.
In the first phase of the German plan, when the intention had not
yet been formed to occupy the whole of the Netherlands, the capture of
the West Frisian Islands of Schiermonnikoog, Ameland, Terschelling
and Vlieland was a major target for the operations to be carried out in
the north. The driving force behind this was the Luftwaffe, which wanted
to use these islands for “air warning purposes”.3 For transferring troops
from the coast of Groningen and Friesland to the West Frisian Islands, the
Kriegsmarine created a Sonderkommando under the command of Korvet-
tenkapitän Stein which was to carry out its mission using commandeered
boats. Neither the Kriegsmarine nor Army Group B was particularly en-
thusiastic about this assignment, which after all only served the interests
of the air force.
On 25 January 1940, the Oberbefehlshaber des Heeres, Generaloberst
Walther von Brauchitsch, informed the staff of Army Group B that the
whole of the Netherlands was to be occupied. For the 1st Cavalry Division,
this change of plan meant that the West Frisian Islands were no longer
considered important by the leadership and that the original assignment
was eventually cancelled. The commander of the 18th Army, General der
Artillerie Georg von Küchler, under whose command the 1st Cavalry
3 Idem, 18 November 1939.
“vorwärts denken, vorwärts sehen, vorwärts reiten!” 323
Division now came, decided to deploy the cavalry in the attack on For-
tress Holland. The division was therefore ordered, after the capture of the
northern provinces, to capture the north-eastern part of the IJsselmeer
Dam and to prepare for a landing in the Medemblik–Hoorn area con-
ducted from the Frisian IJsselmeer ports. Sonderkommando-Stein was to
carry out the naval part of this crossing.
Ironically, German interest in the IJsselmeer Dam arose from an aver-
sion to water rather than, as was assumed by Dutch military planners, a
desire for an alternative, nautical route for penetrating Fortress Holland.
The latter was to be achieved via the Moerdijk–Rotterdam axis and as a
result of breaching the Grebbe Line and the New Dutch Waterline. The
capture of the IJsselmeer Dam was directly linked to the latter operation.
The German army leadership had, it has to be said, a low opinion of the
enemy’s combat power. The German military did, however, fear that old
‘ally’ of the Dutch: the water. A report by the Oberkommando des Heeres
(OKH), tellingly entitled “opportunities for an assault on Fortress Holland”,
allocated a substantial role to the modern sluice complexes at Kornwer-
324 chapter nine
derzand and Den Oever in managing the water level of inundated areas
at the Grebbe Line and the Waterline.4 If German troops were able to
capture these sluices undamaged, they would be able to lower the water
level in the IJsselmeer and thus cut off the flow to the inundated areas,
resulting in the latter losing their defensive power. This would of course
take some time. The operation was therefore important in the event that
the attack by the Xth Corps on the Grebbe Line foundered. The German
army leadership, which was well-informed of the defensive works at
Kornwerderzand and Den Oever, was aware that surprise attacks were the
only chance of success. Neither paratroops nor navy ships were available,
however, for a coup de main against Den Oever, so the north-eastern part
of the IJsselmeer Dam—i.e. the Kornwerderzand complex—remained the
only operational target.
The possibility of landing on the coast of West Friesland, the northern
part of the province of Noord-Holland, was based on the German expec-
tation that the Defence Line of Amsterdam, the central redoubt of For-
tress Holland, would serve as the final line of defence if the enemy was
able to mount a staunch defence (a possibility which, although viewed as
highly unlikely, could not be entirely discounted). In the event of such a
situation arising, the 1st Cavalry Division was to advance from West Fries-
land in order to break any remaining resistance.
In summary then, both operational targets—Kornwerderzand and a
landing in West Friesland—would have a substantially delayed effect on
operations elsewhere, even if they were carried out successfully. Only in
the event of severe stagnation on the main fronts would the deeds of the
1st Cavalry Division be of great importance to Army Group B and the 18th
Army. It is therefore no great surprise that the higher echelons showed lit-
tle interest in the preparations of the division in the spring of 1940.
In this respect, Generalmajor Feldt was free to prepare his men for their
assignment in the green Dutch landscape. There were repeated exercises
in surprise attacks on bridges, in crossing water obstacles, in removing
obstacles and putting casemates out of action. On the basis of gathered in-
telligence, Feldt drew up the following plan of attack for his 12,000-strong
division. He wanted to cross the border at four locations on a line between
Nieuweschans and Kloosterhaar, an area covering more than a hundred
kilometres. In the north, the 1st Cyclist Battalion (approx. 875 men) was
to initiate the attack at Nieuweschans and advance towards Groningen. Si-
multaneously, an armoured train was to surprise the border guards and
4 Gr. Landesverteidigung OKH, No. 120/39.g.Kdos, 5 December 1939, in: BA-MA, RH

24/10-2.
ride towards Harlingen via Groningen and Leeuwarden. From Harlingen,

a lightening raid would then be carried out on the head of the IJsselmeer
Dam.
In the middle, the 2nd Mounted Regiment, reinforced with a battery of
mounted artillery and thus comprising a total of about 2,000 men, would
cross the border at Emmer-Compascuum and advance via Emmen and
Sleen towards Assen and Beilen. The main effort of the attack by the 1st
Cavalry Division lay in the German territorial indentation in the Dutch
border to the south of Coevorden. The distance from the border to the
IJsselmeer was only 50 kilometres here, so that a rapid advance would
on the one hand prevent Dutch units from retreating towards the IJssel
Line and on the other hand pose a threat to the Dutch flank to the north.
Mounted Regiments 1 and 22, together comprising about 4,000 men and
commanded by Oberst F.M. von Senger und Etterlin, were to launch the
fiercest assault with the support of almost an entire regiment of mounted
artillery. They were to operate along two parallel axes of attack, namely
Coevorden–Hoogeveen and Hardenberg–Meppel. The 21st Mounted Reg-
iment, with a force of 1,200 men, was positioned behind this assault sec-
tor as division reserve.
On 9 May, the division staff was gathered at Lingen for a Kriegsspiel
when Feldt received the order from the 18th Army. It was time to synchro-
nise watches: that evening the cavalrymen took up their posts near the
border. In his Tagesbefehl for 10 May, Generalmajor Feldt quoted the tra-
ditional cavalry creed: “Vorwärts denken, vorwärts sehen, vorwärts reiten”
[Think forward, look forward, ride forward].
The territorial defence of the northern Netherlands
In the meantime, Feldt’s Dutch counterpart, the Territorial Commander

in Friesland (TBF), Colonel J. Veenbaas, was struggling with the prob-
lem of how to guard, and if necessary defend, a 75-km border with only
five infantry battalions and a handful of support units. General Winkel-
man envisaged two tasks for Veenbaas and his men: timely warning in
the event of the Germans crossing the border, followed by “a retreat while
slowing the enemy advance as much as possible”.5 The main aim of any re-
treat should be to prevent the enemy from gaining access to the IJsselmeer
Dam for as long as possible.
5 V.E. Nierstrasz, De territoriale verdediging van de noordelijke provinciën (The Hague,

1952) 1.
326 chapter nine
Territorial Commander in Friesland 12 mei

May 1940
1940
Territorial Commander
in Friesland
Assen Group Groningen Group Surveillance

C - 33RI C - 36RI detachments
C - II - 33RI C - 1 GB C - I - 36RI C - 12 GB C - II - 36RI
2 33 2 1 1 36 12 3 2/36
33 1 1 2/36 12
2
33 (-) 1 1/36 3 12 (-)

(-)
2 12
Intensive discussions between General Headquarters and the TBF ulti-

mately led to a defence plan in which three lines were allocated a central
role: the O Line, the Q Line and the F Line. The O Line was situated close
to the border and comprised small border detachments, often of infantry
group size (eleven men), which were to raise the alarm immediately in the
event of an enemy attack. Next, these “eyes and ears” of the TBF were to
attempt to delay a German advance by placing prepared obstacles and by
destroying objects prepared in advance. Having carried this out, they were
to withdraw to the main line of defence, the Q Line, to fill the largest gaps
in the defence. This Q Line, which lay behind a linked system of canals
(namely Termunterzijldiep, Oosterdiep, Zuider Hoofdvaart and Oranje
Canal), was anything but a closed front. Due to a lack of troops, Veen-
baas had to make do with deploying detachments at traffic intersections,
chiefly at bridges, where they were to offer opposition for as long as pos-
sible. Concrete casemates were constructed at some of these intersections
expressly for this purpose.
As the Territorial Commander in Overijssel (TBO), Colonel J. Dwars,
had positioned his main forces at the IJssel Line, there was a risk of an
open flank between the TBF’s sector and that of the TBO. For this rea-
son, Veenbaas extended his Q Line from the Hoogeveense Vaart south of
Oosterhesselen up to the IJsselmeer at Zwartsluis. This southern position,
known as the F Line, was manned by the IInd battalion of the 33rd Infan-
try Regiment (II-33 RI). This battalion was led by the commander of the
33rd Infantry Regiment, Reserve Lieutenant Colonel W.A. Groenendijk,
as were I-36 RI, the 1st Reserve Border Company and the 1st Border Bat-
talion. His command post was located at Beilen. Together, these units
formed the Assen Group. The commander of the 36th Infantry Regiment,
Reserve Lieutenant Colonel J.H. Sonne, who led the Groningen Group,
was stationed in Vries. This group comprised II-36 RI, the 12th Border
Battalion, the 1st Surveillance Troops Company and the 12th Reserve Bor-
der Company. Lieutenant Colonel Sonne also took into account the pos-
sibility of a German attack over water, via the Dollard or the Ems.
Since 10 April, when Winkelman had withdrawn two battalions from
the TBF to the centre of the country, Veenbaas had had no reserves at his
disposal. This meant that if the enemy breached his line of defence at any
point he was unable to call on reserves to plug the gap, never mind to
retaliate against the enemy. In such a situation the enemy could easily ob-
literate the defence lines by means of attacks from the rear. The territorial
defence of the northern Netherlands depended greatly on the border bat-
talions: by timely warnings, the destruction of strategically important ob-
jects and withdrawal to the Q Line, they were to enable a delay in combat
in the main line of defence.
A morning of battle and a pursuit in vain
Well before X-Zeit, namely at 03.00 hrs, a German armoured train sur-
prised the station guard and the railway bridge detachment at Nieuwe-
schans. The train would not get far, however. The vigilance of the Dutch
guards at the bridge over the Buiskooldiep, some four kilometres further
along the line, resulted in the bridge being blown up just in time. Al-
though German pioneers had brought bridge-laying materiel with them
and quickly repaired the crossing, the element of surprise was lost. This
was immediately apparent at the next railway bridge across the Zijlster-
diep. The alerted troops had destroyed this one completely and were for
some time also able to hold back the troops who had disembarked from
the armoured train with direct fire. As a result, the train was forced to
return to Germany without having fulfilled its mission. Colonel Veenbaas
was not immediately informed of this border crossing due to a faulty ra-
dio. The first news he received was of German attacks in south-east Dren-
the. On the basis of this news, he issued the order to ‘destroy’ at 04.30 hrs.
In the meantime, the border detachments that had seen enemy soldiers
appear so suddenly in front of them, and this was only the case in part of
328 chapter nine
1. Kavalleriedivision
May 1940
XX
1
X
1
2
21
22
40
86
40
6 Initial combat for scouts of the 1st Cavalry Division at Coevorden,

10 May 1940.
the O Line, had not waited for this order. In many cases, they had already
blown up the bridges at their own initiative after having reported the at-
tack. The battle was rather confusing. In a few places, the defenders were
simply taken by surprise. Elsewhere, they operated alertly and efficiently.
This was the case at, among other places, the border crossing at Emmer-
Compascuum. The Germans attempted to use a ruse involving 90 cavalry-
men crossing the border hidden in three vehicles covered with sailcloth.
This failed thanks to the vigilance of a Dutch sentry.
At 05.30 hrs the TBF ordered a withdrawal to the Q Line while carry-
ing out the prepared demolitions in the intervening area. This chiefly in-
volved bridges which played an essential part in the battle. German efforts
focused on trying to capture these vital objects as soon as possible. On
the main assault axis, the reconnaissance groups, which often operated on
horseback or sometimes on motorbikes, had been expressly charged with
seeking unguarded or poorly guarded bridges and preventing their de-
struction. They were not to waste time on demolished or heavily defended
objects; a radio report on these would suffice. The ultimate occupation of
a bridge often depended on a minor detail. For example, valiant defend-
ers often had to look on helplessly as in several cases detonators failed to
work or the fuses were extinguished by the wind or, as in one case, how
a German lieutenant extinguished a burning fuse at great risk to his own
life. On the Dutch side, there were soldiers who, with a total disregard
for their own safety, succeeded in blowing up ‘their’ bridges in the face of
the oncoming enemy. In total, over the course of that one morning, 236
bridges were rendered unusable in the TBF sector.
From the start, the battle on the Q Line was fought rather chaotically
on the Dutch side. There were two main reasons for this. Firstly, the 1st
Cavalry Division advanced so quickly in some sectors of the Assen Group
that its advance party arrived simultaneously with the withdrawing bor-
der detachments. As a result, there was hardly any time to organise the
defence. Furthermore, poorly functioning communications equipment
constantly thwarted Colonel Veenbaas and his subordinate commanders.
Their command relied heavily on the regular telephone network. Tele-
communications were paralysed when the railway bridge at Zwolle, which
carried vital telephone lines, was blown up. Poor communications and the
relatively large distances between units meant that effective command was
impossible, even at battalion level.
The combat power of a group or section (34 men), largely left to them-
selves, therefore came to depend more than usual on the personal qualities
of the individual commander. These were sometimes lacking in the heat
of the battle, but in other cases the commander rose to the occasion.
For example, Sergeant K. van de Baaren and three of his men succeeded
in surprising and halting a German reconnaissance group from a well-
camouflaged casemate at the Lutterhoofdwijk Canal on the southernmost
tip of the Q Line. They were able to hold out for nearly four hours against
a force of up to three squadrons. After the four exhausted defenders had fi-
nally surrendered, a further drama was only narrowly avoided. The irritat-
ed Germans, who had seen a well-loved officer killed, wanted to put them
up against the wall as they had apparently misused the white flag during
the battle. Luckily, the local innkeeper reported that he had waved a white
cushion out of fear. The mayor of Coevorden, who happened to be passing,
was able to convince the German officers that the defenders could not have
seen the white flag from their casemate. The incident blew over.6
At other locations, too, the Germans met with stubborn resistance. In
Groningen, the cyclists came up against strong opposition at Ganzendijk
6 H. Brand, Die lange Morgen in Mei. 10 Mei 1940 (Meppel, 1980) 175-176. For the
accounts by the personnel involved (K. van de Baaren, B. Schuiling, M. Vugteveen and S.
Beetstra) see: Documentatie Nederlands Instituut voor Militaire Historie Den Haag (DC-
NIMH), Strijd Nederlands Grondgebied, box 469, file 29.
330 chapter nine
and Nieuwolda. In Drenthe, the unwavering defence by Reserve Second

Lieutenant M.H. de Vroome and his nineteen men at the Oosterhesselen
bridge is worthy of mention: they succeeded in countering German supe-
riority for over two hours. At the F Line, too, where the enemy placed the
main focus of the attack on the sector between Echten and Meppel, the sol-
diers put up a brave fight even though they were often completely isolated.
In spite of these isolated successes, the general picture was far from
rosy. Firstly, there was absolutely no coordination of the defence and its
effectiveness was therefore limited. Secondly, and this was of overriding
importance, wherever the Germans had decided to force a breach of the
line it was merely a matter of time before the defenders surrendered or
withdrew. As early as 10.00 hrs, Colonel Veenbaas was forced to conclude
that the battle was over–the TBF had expected to put up longer-lasting
resistance. Following reports of a German breach at Sleen, he was afraid
the Groningen Group would be cut off. At 10.25 hrs he ordered the TBF
to withdraw to the Wons Position. He envisaged an organised retreat here:
the Groningen Group would withdraw first, covered by the Assen Group.
This plan came to nothing, however. The chaos on the Drenthe front and
the poor communications led to the withdrawal deteriorating into an im-
provised sauve qui peut, with a few exceptions. The order did not even
reach some of the sections and groups. They were faced with a difficult
decision: try to reach the IJsselmeer Dam after all, continue fighting or
surrender to the first German they encountered. In the event, all three op-
tions were used.
The Dutch soldiers threw themselves into the retreat with great enthu-
siasm and imagination. The majority managed to reach the Wons Position
before darkness fell, using modes of transport which included bicycles,
(commandeered) cars, buses and trucks. As the TBF was not there to re-
ceive them and organise a regrouping, their passing through the position
and their retreat across the IJsselmeer Dam was rather chaotic. On pass-
ing the lines, the wild stories told by the retreating soldiers, most of whom
had not even been involved in actual combat with the enemy, severely
tested the nerves of the soldiers stationed there.
At 21.00 hrs, Colonel Veenbaas reported to the commander of the
Wons Position, Reserve Major B. Smid, that all his troops had evacuated
the area safely. After this, the TBF crossed the IJsselmeer Dam himself.
His last report proved to be incorrect, and was to have repercussions for
several TBF units which only arrived at the Wons Position on 11 May:
they were met by friendly fire.
The retreating troops were unhindered by the 1st Cavalry Division on 10

May. The speed with which the Dutch withdrew took the Germans com-
pletely by surprise. Even without encountering opposition, they had their
hands full in achieving the objectives set for the first day of operations, i.e.
reaching the Groningen–Assen–Beilen–Steenwijk line. Exhaustion started
to take its toll. Some of the cavalrymen had ridden 120 kilometres in twen-
ty-four hours. Furthermore, the large number of destroyed bridges, many
more than the Germans had expected, led to problems for the logistic units
and this had resulted in delays. The Kriegstagebuch of the 18th Army de-
scribed the situation of the 1st Cavalry Division on 10 May aptly:
Following reports throughout the course of the afternoon, the 1st Cavalry
Division quickly reached the Dutch provinces of Groningen and Drenthe,
having encountered innumerable obstacles and destroyed bridges and little
enemy opposition.7
In the early hours of 11 May, the Germans set off in pursuit, in transport
which included commandeered buses. Their pursuit was to be in vain,
however. In the afternoon, the German advance party reached the Wons
Position. Feldt ordered his cyclist battalion to clear this last line before
the IJsselmeer Line and deployed his troops as follows: the cyclists were
stationed in front of the Wons Position with the 2nd Mounted Regiment
behind them as reserves; the 1st Mounted Regiment was deployed to the
south and southeast of Makkum and the 22nd Mounted Regiment occu-
pied the strip of coast between Stavoren and Lemmer.
Korvettenkapitän Stein was immediately tasked with commandeering
boats, either for a landing to the rear of the Kornwerderzand complex or
for the crossing to West Friesland. His first report showed that the Dutch
had acted efficiently when it came to maritime matters: there were hardly
any boats to be had and many harbour entrances were unusable.
The collapse of the Wons Position
As an outpost to the IJsselmeer Dam, the Wons Position was part of the
Den Helder Position, which was commanded by Rear Admiral H. Jolles.
General Winkelman had issued him with the following order for the
Wons Position: to protect access to the IJsselmeer Dam against a coup de
main, to receive the retreating TBF troops and “to attempt to prevent the
7 Kriegstagebuch AOK 18, 10 May 1940, in: BA-MA, N 126/19.

332 chapter nine
Wons Position and Kornwerderzand 10 mei 1940
Commander of the
Den Helder Position
Wons Position Kornwerderzand

C - I - 33RI detachment
1 33
1 12
1/36
45
enemy accessing the IJsselmeer Dam for as long as possible”.8 It is, how-
ever, questionable whether this latter task had been made absolutely clear
to the soldiers stationed at the Wons Position. For example, at 16.30 hrs
on 11 May, Major B. Smid sent his supply train back across the IJsselmeer
Dam. Three-quarters of an hour later, he formally reported to Jolles that
evacuation of the northern Dutch provinces was complete and he explic-
8 V.E. Nierstrasz, De Stelling van Den Helder. Mei 1940 (The Hague, 1960) 29.
Nierstrasz wonders whether the commander of the Wons Position really was properly in-
formed of the instruction. A note held by the Netherlands Institute for War Documentation
with a strongly defensive tone, the provenance of which is unknown, states of Bouwe Smid
that the commander of the Wons Position was surprised by the order to hold his ground.
itly requested instructions. “Hold your ground,” was the reply.9 The rear
admiral was unable to supply the requested artillery, air-defence and air
support, however.
Self-confidence among the soldiers was certainly not high. The nine-
kilometre position, which ran from Zurich via Wons to Makkum, com-
prised field fortifications constructed from wood and earth, which could
not be dug into the ground due to the high groundwater level and which
therefore protruded high above ground level. These “molehills”, as they
were nicknamed contemptuously by the soldiers, were “open to enemy
reconnaissance troops, combat aircraft and artillery scouts as if present-
ed on a plate”.10 The planned inundations had not yet been completed. In
addition, the retreating TBF troops had had a demoralising effect. There
were cases of overwrought nerves. For example, at the office of the com-
mander of the Makkum sector, Captain C. Mars, regular Sergeant Major
B. de Jong was shot dead on 11 May after repeatedly firing on his own
troops and at civilians.
Smid had few troops to deploy against his German opponents; the cy-
clist battalion had reinforcements of almost a complete artillery battalion
and a battery of light anti-aircraft guns. He only had his own battalion,
I-33 RI, reinforced by the 9th Reserve Border Company, the 1st company
of the 12th Border Battalion (withdrawn from the O Line), the 1st Surveil-
lance Troops Company, the 45th 6-Veld Field-gun Battery and a few other
sections from other units. The Germans carried out their attack with pro-
fessionalism. On the early morning of 12 May, reconnaissance units were
sent to sound out various points along the Wons Position. Next, German
planes machine-gunned the Dutch positions. Although the air attack re-
sulted in few casualties, it did create a strong sense of fear. At 12.00 hrs,
the artillery launched an attack lasting half an hour, the main effort of
which was in the sector between Gooium and Hajum. When the guns fell
silent, the cyclists went into action. They were preceded by an antitank
gun which opened fire on the first field fortification which put up resist-
ance. The soldiers surrendered after the first hit. The white shirt which
they held up as a sign of surrender, presently followed by a second and
third elsewhere, set off a chain reaction: one post after another surren-
dered. Within half an hour, the aggressors had captured the outpost sector
and had penetrated the line of resistance. The direction of advance took
9 ��
“Verslag-bevelen en berichten 10 t/m 14 mei, 1940”, in: DC-NIMH, Strijd Neder-
10 ��
I.L. Uijterschout,
��
“De Afsluitdijk en de Stelling van Den Helder 10-15 mei 1940”,
Militaire Spectator, CXLIX (1980) 213.
A 6-Veld field gun at I-33 RI in the Wons Position.
A Dutch soldier killed at the Wons Position.

the Dutch soldiers by surprise as it was along the Pingjum–Kornwerd axis.

They had expected an assault across and along the number 43 main road.
Some of the defence positions were consequently unusable and therefore
other positions had to be taken up.
The rapid German advance threatened to cut off the left flank, the
sector at Zurich. The company commander therefore telephoned Major
Smid’s command post. At that moment the latter was busy elsewhere.
Lieutenant A.A. Lind, who was at the command post, gave his personal
opinion: “If I were you I would retreat to the IJsselmeer Dam while con-
tinuing the fight.”11 Major Smid, however, had not yet considered retreat-
ing. He was therefore astonished to see 3-I-33 RI withdrawing to the IJs-
selmeer at great speed. Smid informed the commander of his right sector
of this, the abovementioned Captain Mars, and requested him to cover a
possible withdrawal of the central sector. He himself would try to bring
3-I-33 RI back into combat.
This was easier said than done. Fearing the advancing German troops,
the commander of the Kornwerderzand detachment, Captain C.F.J. Boers,
had blown up the bridge offering access to the dam and in front of this
were a few hundred Dutch soldiers on the Frisian side. Although Smid
and other officers succeeded in restoring order, Rear Admiral Jolles gave
permission to withdraw across the IJsselmeer Dam. The risk of an air at-
tack on these defenceless troops must have been too much for him.
In the meantime, a vicious battle was raging in the central section of
the Wons Position, held by 1-I-33 RI under the command of Captain P.
van der Linden. This reserve officer, determined to fight until the bitter
end, succeeded in inspiring his men to give their all, thanks to his zeal and
personal courage. At 16.40 hrs, he too had to surrender to the inevitable,
however, and gave the signal to retreat. In Makkum, Van der Linden was
forced to face the harsh reality that the adjacent companies had already
crossed the IJsselmeer using all the available boats. The courageous de-
fenders of the Wons sector had no choice but to surrender to the enemy.
A total of over three hundred Dutch soldiers were taken prisoner by the
1st Cavalry Division that afternoon.
The first German soldiers reached the IJsselmeer Dam at 17.00 hrs on
12 May. Under the cover of encroaching darkness, enemy storm troops
succeeded in penetrating up to the bridge opening in front of the Korn-
werderzand position when they were mistaken by the Dutch soldiers for
a group that had got left behind. When the Germans opened fire on one
11 ��
Exchange of letters between V.E. Nierstrasz and Captain A.A. Lind, in: DC-NIMH,
336 chapter nine
of the searchlights, heavy Dutch rifle fire drove them back. Two German
soldiers ended up in a minefield, “resulting in one man being torn apart
by a mine”.12
Feldt was now in an unenviable position: due to a lack of boats, he
could not cross to West Friesland, but neither could he carry out an as-
sault to the rear of Kornwerderzand. Furthermore, the gunboat HNLMS
Friso from the IJsselmeer flotilla had increased the cavalrymen’s fear of
the water by firing a direct hit on a battery of the 1st Cavalry Division,
which was deployed in Stavoren, leaving three Germans dead. Feldt there-
fore only had one option open to him: to try to capture Kornwerderzand
via the IJsselmeer Dam which provided no cover.
The offensive reconnaissance mission fails
The Dutch soldiers at Kornwerderzand were full of self-confidence and

were prepared for battle. That should come as no surprise. Their position
was one of the most modern in the Netherlands. It comprised two lines of
casemates, one to the east and one to the west of the drainage sluices. The
first line was made up of fourteen constructions, including seven com-
bat casemates, a hospital casemate and a searchlight casemate. The second
line served primarily as cover in the event of an assault to the rear. All the
casemates were constructed from heavily reinforced concrete. The tops
were approximately three metres thick. These were generally also covered
by a 30-cm layer of earth. On 12 May, the Luftwaffe had already carried
out two air raids on the position which did not result in any casualties or
cause any severe damage. The detachment—7 officers, 25 NCOs and 193
other ranks—was therefore convinced of its own strength. The soldiers
had been stationed there for a while and their commander, the abovemen-
tioned Captain Boers, had succeeded in making them into a close team.
A highly effective firing plan had been prepared for the 12 heavy machine
guns and four 5cm guns in the first line, a plan which thanks to a system
of flanking fire covered the entire access to the position. Underground ca-
bles enabled excellent communications, even with Den Helder.
Boers, who was idolised by his men, was a competent professional sol-
dier, who managed to stay calm during those turbulent days in May 1940.
On 11 May, he ordered that the field of fire be cleared by destroying a pet-
rol station and wooden hotel. On the same day, a month’s worth of provi-
sions was obtained and put into storage and the underground water tanks
12 ��
“Die 1. Kavallerie-Division im Westen 10.5.40-29.6.40”, in: BA-MA, RH 29-1/54.
German 37mm antitank gun at the head of the IJsselmeer Dam.
The failed offensive reconnaissance mission on 13 May.

338 chapter nine
were filled to the brim. On the eastern side of the position, a double row
of beam-post obstacles was erected. Dutch engineers laid a minefield in
front of this on 11 May.
On the night of 11 May, Boers ordered his artillery officer, Reserve
Second Lieutenant W.J.H. IJzereef, to send out a bicycle patrol of about
ten men towards the mainland. On its return, the patrol reported that it
had seen no enemy activity. The events of 12 May described earlier had
no effect on the men’s morale. In order to make the position less vulner-
able to air attacks, Rear Admiral Jolles sent an anti-aircraft battery and an
anti-aircraft machine-gun platoon to Kornwerderzand as reinforcements.
These units arrived there in the early hours of 13 May, to the great en-
thusiasm of the Dutch soldiers who had until then been unable to offer
resistance to the enemy aircraft. The three 2cm anti-aircraft guns under
the command of Reserve Second Lieutenant G.J. Vis and Warrant Officer
J. Kalma were placed in the first line, the second anti-aircraft machine-
gun platoon was placed in the second line under Ensign Fritschi. The ef-
fectiveness of this decision by the commander of the Den Helder Position
was proved only a few hours later. During a renewed air raid, the unsus-
pecting German pilots were treated to heavy fire in reply. In spite of the
enemy machine-gun bullets raining down on them, the soldiers manning
the guns continued to fire back undaunted. The fierce air defence forced
the German aircraft to carry out subsequent raids from a higher altitude.
The two sides countered each other’s ruses with new ruses of their own.
The German pilots attempted to lull the Dutch air defence into a false
sense of security by carrying out mock battles. The soldiers at Kornwer-
derzand replied by placing stovepipes in a camouflaged construction in
order to confuse the aggressor into thinking they were guns.
During the course of the afternoon, German batteries opened fire from
the head of the IJsselmeer Dam. Their fire, however, had little effect on the
three-metre-thick concrete casing. In one casemate a masking cover came
loose, blocking the line of fire of the 5.5cm gun, but this was remedied
by the fearless action of Private W. Pronk. He succeeded in removing the
cover in the midst of enemy fire. The attempt by the 1st Cavalry Division
to fire at the casemate embrasures using specially positioned anti-aircraft
guns failed.
At about 18.00 hrs, Captain Boers saw movement at the head of the
IJsselmeer Dam through his observation periscope. In his combat report
written on 22 May, he described his impressions as follows: “An enemy
infantry section of about 70 men had been sent forward across the dam.
They were fired on with high-explosive grenades from casemate VI.”13 Be-
fore firing on and thus halting the German shock troops, Boers had or-
dered that they should be allowed to advance until they were about 800
metres away. This was achieved thanks to excellent firing discipline. The
German troops had no choice but to retreat. The foremost soldiers were
only able to return to their lines under the cover of darkness. Three Ger-
mans were killed during this offensive reconnaissance mission.14 Just be-
fore midnight, the 1st Cavalry Division reported to the 18th Army that the
mission had failed. The reason given was that the German artillery and
anti-aircraft guns were not able to take out the casemates. The army group
thought the attempted assault too insignificant to report in the day’s com-
bat report. All that von Küchler reported to Army Group B was: “Offen-
sive reconnaissance of positions to the north-east exit of the IJsselmeer
Dam unsuccessful.”15
The troops at Kornwerderzand continued to operate in an alert fashion.
For example, during the night of 13 May, Boers had the soldiers deliver
harassing fire from time to time, set off flares and switch searchlights on
and off to indicate that the Dutch troops were ready for further combat.
Rear Admiral Jolles and his chief of the Army Staff Section, Captain
I.L. Uijterschout, had also been busy. After they had sent the air-defence
units to Kornwerderzand, they consulted on opportunities for eradicat-
ing enemy artillery fire. The arrival in Den Helder of gunboat HNLMS
Johan Maurits van Nassau was used for this purpose. On the afternoon
of 13 May, Jolles sent the boat to the entrance of a channel to the north of
the dam, known as the Doove Balg, from which the 15cm guns could just
reach the head of the dam. Maritime assistance was not without its risks.
Jolles had asked British air-defence vessel HMS Valorous to provide the
Johan Maurits van Nassau with air cover, but this request was not hon-
oured, and the Dutch ship therefore had no protection against air attacks.
This was particularly risky as the narrow channel offered the ship little
room for manoeuvre. When darkness fell, the ship fired three trial rounds.
On 14 May, German artillery again commenced firing at 08.00 hrs. The
German lines were greatly surprised when this was answered an hour lat-
er. From 09.00 hrs, the Johan Maurits van Nassau fired on the enemy artil-
13 ��
“Verslag C-detachement Kornwerderzand, kap C.F. Boers”, 22 May 1940, in: DC-
Official report dated 23 April 1980 from the Deutschen Dienststelle für die Benach-
14 ��
richtigung der nächsten Angehörigen von Gefallenen der ehemaligen deutschen Wehrmacht
(WAst), in: DC-NIMH, Strijd Nederlands Grondgebied, box 462, file 13A. In what is known
as the Ehrentafel in Die 1. Kavallerie-Division im Westen, three fatalities are mentioned.
15 ��
1a.
��
A.O.K. 18, “Morgenmeldung 8.00 Uhr”, in: BA-MA, RH 19 II/99.
Preparations in Lemmer harbour for ferrying materiel to the coast of Noord-Holland.
Informing the home front, 15 May, following news of the Dutch capitulation.
lery positions using her aft gun. The troops at Kornwerderzand observed
proceedings via their periscopes and passed on corrections to Den Helder.
These were then passed on to the naval ship in code. The first correction
was received on the twentieth shot–firing velocity was one shot every 35
seconds. Until 10.30 hrs, the gunboat continued to fire, apart from one
pause of fifteen minutes due to the threat of air attacks. Her firing was ac-
curate: Kornwerderzand would no longer be hindered by enemy artillery
fire.
Only the Luftwaffe could still cause problems for the Dutch soldiers;
during the afternoon, two aircraft bombed the position, albeit with little
effect. The troops took measures to repair any damage; in addition, pio-
neers were actively helping to reinforce positions. When Captain Boers
contacted the staff of the Den Helder Position commander, he was given
the order to capitulate. He could not believe this order and Jolles himself
had to confirm it. News of the capitulation was a bolt from the blue for his
men. The Germans were also surprised when Captain Boers came to offer
surrender. The 1st Cavalry Division had already decided that it was im-
possible to capture Kornwerderzand without large-scale air support and
heavy artillery.
Conclusion
The advance of the 1st Cavalry Division through the northern Netherlands
went completely according to plan. German losses were limited. From 10
to 15 May, the cavalry division lost 21 men. On the Dutch side there were
22 casualties. Approximately half of the fatalities had occurred during the
first few hours of hostilities, a common percentage.16
Thanks to the halting of the armoured train at Nieuweschans and
thanks to the Wons Position, German efforts to capture the sluices at Korn-
werderzand in a surprise attack were in vain. After having tested the Dutch
A report by the abovementioned WAst. The Ehrentafel (roll of honour) lists 23

16 ��
��
deaths, but includes two instances of drowning on 16 May. The doctor attached to the 1st
Cavalry Division notes no heavy losses in his combat report. On 17 May, when the divi-
sion dressing station has to be moved, he reports 64 patients. These comprise the “sick”
and “wounded”. Of these patients, eight are considered “unfit for transport”, (the majority
of) these are undoubtedly the most severely wounded. On the Dutch side, in the TBF area
9 soldiers were killed, including a soldier from 1-12 Border Battalion who lost his life at
the Wons Position (Nierstrasz, Noordelijke provinciën, 69). During the battle for the Wons
Position, 13 soldiers were killed, including conscript Private G. Confurius who was shot by
Sergeant Major B. de Jong, and the sergeant major himself (DC-NIMH, Strijd Nederlands
Grondgebied, box 461, file 4).
342 chapter nine
soldiers in this modern fortification using air raids on 12 May, Feldt de-
cided to try a further test on 13 May. The day’s operation was certainly not
a large-scale assault, but an offensive reconnaissance mission. When the
Dutch troops proved that they were not about to surrender, the mission
was immediately called off. In contrast to the battle around the O, Q and F
lines and at the Wons Position, Kornwerderzand was defended by means
of good, efficient command, both at senior level by the commander of the
Den Helder Position and on the spot by Captain Boers.
CHAPTER TEN
NOT A BRIDGE TOO FAR: THE BATTLE FOR

THE MOERDIJK BRIDGES, DORDRECHT AND ROTTERDAM
The German plans
As has been mentioned on several occasions, the advance through Noord-

Brabant constituted the main effort of the German attack on the Nether-
lands. One of the missions of the German army elements that carried out
this attack was to penetrate Fortress Holland from the south by using the
bridges at Moerdijk to cross the Hollands Diep and those at Dordrecht
to cross the Oude Maas. To make this possible, those bridges had to be
captured undamaged by the Germans, but it was clear that this would cer-
tainly be no easy task. The Dutch were not to be given any opportunity
to blow up the bridges, and the German army leadership eventually de-
cided that the only way to prevent this was to launch a large-scale attack
by paratroops.1
In January 1940, the commander of the 7th Air Division, Generalmajor
Kurt Student was advised of this decision. He was promoted to General�
leutnant and was given command of a newly formed Airborne Corps,
comprising his own division and the 22nd Air Transportable Division. This
Luftwaffe corps was given the task of both carrying out the surprise attack
on the airfields around The Hague and “keeping the bridges at Moerdijk
(point of main effort) and Rotterdam open for the subsequent arrival of
the mobile troops coming in via Tilburg–Breda”.2 The 22nd Air Transport-
able Division was then designated for the attack on The Hague, for which
it was reinforced with a battalion and a company from the 7th Air Divi-
sion. In exchange for this, it had had to give up the 16th Infantry Regiment
and several support units to the air division. In the meantime, Student
1 Hans Umbreit, “Der Kampf um die Vormachtstellung in Westeuropa” in: Klaus A.

Maier et al., Das deutsche Reich und der Zweite Weltkrieg.��
��
Band 2. Die Errichtung der Hege�
monie auf dem europäischen Kontinent (Stuttgart, 1979) 259-260.
2 M.R.H. Calmeyer and V.E. Nierstrasz, De krijgsverrichtingen op het zuidfront van de
Vesting Holland. Mei 1940 (The Hague, 1963) 238-248.
344 chapter ten
Morning of 10 May 1940: German paratroops descending near the Moerdijk railway bridge.
(Composite photograph.)
was formulating his plans for the airborne landings. He split the 7th Air
Division into five groups for the attack on the bridges. Gruppe Süd was
to land at Moerdijk and Dordrecht and consisted mainly of the Ist and IInd
battalions of the 1st Parachute Regiment. The main objective of this group,
which was operating under the command of the fanatic National Socialist
Oberst B.O. Bräuer, was to capture the Moerdijk bridges; for the bridges
over the Oude Maas at Dordrecht, only one company had been reserved,
namely the 3rd of the Ist battalion.
A second group, consisting of the IIIrd battalion of the 1st Parachute
Regiment, was to take possession of Waalhaven airfield at Rotterdam and
keep control of it so that it could be used to fly in reinforcements. General-
leutnant Student and his staff were also to land here. One company from
this battalion, after landing near the Feyenoord soccer stadium, was also
to occupy the bridges over the Nieuwe Maas. Student was, however, not at
all optimistic about the chances of success of this last action: the company
“barely seemed strong enough to prevent the destruction of both bridges
nor—if that were to succeed—to secure the bridges until the arrival of the
IIIrd battalion of the 16th Infantry Regiment”.3 It was the commander-in-
3 Hermann Götzel, ed., Generaloberst Kurt Student und seine Fallschirmjäger.��

Die
��
Erin�
nerungen des Generaloberst Kurt Student (Friedburg, 1980) III.
not a bridge too far 345
chief of the Luftwaffe, Hermann Göring, who therefore suggested that the
11th company of the 16th Infantry Regiment should use Heinkel He-59
floatplanes to land in the centre of Rotterdam, thus enabling a surprise
attack on the bridges over the Nieuwe Maas. This idea seemed better than
the original proposal and the plans for the group were thus changed ac-
cordingly.
The group known as Gruppe Nord was the third one to be formed from
the 7th Air Division. This group was commanded by Oberst Hans Kreysing
and consisted mainly of the 16th Infantry Regiment. Its task was to take
over “as a group the occupation of the Dordrecht–southern Rotterdam
area and the protection of this area to the east and to the north” from the
battalion of paratroops that had landed at the Waalhaven.
The fourth group was made up of the IInd battalion of the 2nd Parachute
Regiment, which had not yet, however, had any parachute training. It
would, therefore, be flown by plane to Waalhaven airfield and move on
from there to Barendrecht. The fifth group consisted of reinforcements
which were to be brought up in the days following the first airborne land-
ings. For transporting the division, the “Special deployment aircraft wing”,
commanded by Oberstleutnant F. Morzik, was available: some 215 Junkers
Ju-52 aircraft.
All in all, it was a bold plan with a great many uncertain factors. There
was a very real possibility that the airborne landings would fail because
the Germans had had so little experience in the tactical deployment of
airborne troops. And what would happen if the German advance through
Noord-Brabant did not proceed according to plan? Nevertheless, the Ger-
mans took the plunge and did so successfully: not only did the 7th Air Di-
vision capture all bridges according to plan, but it also managed to hold
its position until the 9th Panzer Division arrived. The question now is how
to explain this success.
Dutch combat readiness
The Hollands Diep, over which the Moerdijk bridges lay, formed part of
the southern front of Fortress Holland. The area in which the Ist and IInd
battalions of the 1st Parachute Regiment were to land according to the
plans was defended by Dutch troops belonging to what was known as the
Kil Group. This group had its headquarters in Puttershoek and was led by
Reserve Colonel J.A.G. van Andel. The core of the group was made up of
the 28th Infantry Regiment (28 RI), supported by an extra machine-gun
company, several batteries of field artillery and some anti-aircraft artillery.
Southern Front of Fortress Holland May 1940
Commander of
Fortress Holland
Spui Group
Hellevoetsluis Numansdorp Willemstad

1 3/34 14 (-) 13
Sector Sector Bridgehead
1 1/39 1/39(-)
34 (-)
1 39(-) 39 1 2/34 11
XX
(-)
1 2 MR (-)
2
Kil Group
Strijen Wieldrecht Moerdijk

3 34 23 1 17
Sector Sector Bridgehead
6
28 (-)
14 25 3 14
1 28 84
3 3/28 28 12 19 82
83
from10 May 1940
The bridges over the Hollands Diep were protected to the south by a
number of troops (the 3rd company of III-28 RI, the 12th Machine-gun
Company, the 28th 6-Veld Field-gun Battery and the 19th Anti-aircraft Ar-
tillery Battery and the 82nd and 83rd Anti-aircraft Machine-gun Platoon)
which formed what was called the Moerdijk Bridgehead. The command-
er of this bridgehead was Captain J.A.C.J. Marijnen. The defence of the
northern side of the bridges was the responsibility of the commander of
the Wieldrecht-west sector, Reserve Captain W.F.M. Populier. Available to
him for this task were the 1st company of I-28 RI, the 84th Anti-aircraft
Machine-gun Platoon and a group of police troops. The number of troops
available for the defence of the Moerdijk bridges appeared to be sufficient,
certainly because, in the event of a German attack, the 6th Border Battal-
ion stationed in Noord-Brabant would be moved to the bridgehead. But
little thought had as yet been given to the fixed positions, and at the end
of April 1940 the Commander of Fortress Holland, Lieutenant General J.
van Andel, had had the munitions that had been distributed to the troops
stored per company. Only the soldiers in the Moerdijk Bridgehead and a
few soldiers on the northern side of the bridges carried their ammunition
on them.
Unlike at Moerdijk, in Dordrecht there were not many troops that
could be used for an infantry battle. In the Dordrecht cantonment, the
garrison consisted of the Pontoniers and Torpedomen Depot, a unit
which had been almost exclusively trained in technical activities, as well
as a company of pioneers and a railway engineers company.4 The canton-
ment commander was Lieutenant Colonel J.A. Mussert, the brother of
the leader of the NSB (National Socialist Movement). Mussert had spent
his entire career in the torpedo corps and was an outstanding specialist
in this area. Nonetheless, he was not considered suitable for a field com-
mand post because his “physical and mental health” had suffered to such
an extent as a result of serious illness–he had had a brain tumour removed
in 1935–that “he would be able to provide little or no leadership in times
of crisis”.5 Dordrecht had not been expected to end up on the front line,
however, and the army leadership had thus not seen any reason to as-
sign Mussert to a different post. More troops were present in Rotterdam.
Cantonment commander Colonel P.W. Scharroo, an engineer officer, had
under his command the IIIrd battalion of the 39th Infantry Regiment and
three hundred marines, while the IIIrd battalion of the Rifles Regiment
4 A cantonment refers to a number of places situated near to each other in which

troops are stationed and where direct engagement with the enemy is unlikely.
5 Calmeyer and Nierstrasz, Zuidfront, 11.
348 chapter ten
had been at Waalhaven airfield since April 1940. The three hundred ma-
rines, about one hundred of whom were well-trained, were under the
command of the commander of maritime assets, Colonel H.F.J.M.A. von
Frijtag Drabbe, who did not come under the cantonment commander but
directly under the Minister of Defence. Many of the other troops present
in Rotterdam belonged to the depot troops and support units. They had
not been trained for combat posts.
This formation of the Dutch troops was understandable. The Dutch
army leadership were only anticipating limited actions by airborne troops
and not large-scale airborne landings. As a result of the German airborne
operations in the attack on Denmark and Norway, the defences at the
airfields around The Hague—the seat of government—were reinforced.
Lieutenant General Van Andel opted—on the basis of the information
available to him—to allow his troops in Rotterdam, Dordrecht and on the
southern front of Fortress Holland to get some sleep on the night of 9 May
and not to place them on a heightened state of alert.
The German airborne landings
Early in the morning of 10 May, at around 04.00 hrs, the first German air-
craft appeared high above the Hollands Diep. For half an hour, the Dutch
shelters and positions were bombed. Shortly afterwards, some seven hun-
dred paratroops belonging to the IInd battalion of the 1st Parachute Regi-
ment jumped out of their planes to the north and south of the Moerdijk
bridges. They were led in this action by Hauptmann F. Prager, who had
been in hospital until just before the German invasion of the Netherlands.
Prager was suffering from an incurable disease, but wanted to spend the
few months that he had left with his men.
Two companies landed to the south of the Hollands Diep, some in the
field of fire of the 4th section of the 12th Machine-gun Company. This sec-
tion, under the command of Reserve Lieutenant J.M. Broekman, had,
however, sought cover during the bombardment and were overrun by
Germans before they could man the machine guns again. In the mean-
time, another group of paratroops had landed near the railway station
at Lage Zwaluwe. The airborne landings took the troops in the Moerdijk
Bridgehead completely by surprise. Once he had realised the gravity of
the situation, the commander, Captain Marijnen, hurried to his office,
where he telephoned his group commander to advise him of the attack.
Marijnen also ordered Reserve Lieutenant F.P. de Jager, the commander
of the 28th 6-Veld Field-gun Battery, who was present in his office, “if it
German paratroops after landing at the bridgehead at the Moerdijk, on the Brabant bank.
On the left is the road bridge, on the right the railway bridge. The photograph was taken in
September 1940, during the recording of a propaganda film in which the operations of the
Airborne Corps were re-enacted.
The storming of the village of Moerdijk. Later reconstruction.

350 chapter ten
was still possible to go to his guns and do whatever could still be done”.6
De Jager had barely left when Marijnen and several of his men were over-
powered by paratroops. The group of Germans responsible for this were
under the command of Leutnant Dietrich Lemm. After they had taken
out the commander of the bridgehead, the only resistance the group en-
countered came from a few marechaussees and pontoniers, who were ren-
dered harmless in a short firefight, during which Lemm and eight Dutch
servicemen were killed.7
In the meantime, De Jager was trying to escape to the south with two
6-Veld field guns in order to be able to continue the battle, but after one
kilometre it was clear to him that he was completely surrounded. None-
theless, he got one of his guns into position and fired three shots. When
De Jager stood up in order to improve the weapon’s aim, despite the warn-
ings from a captain who had joined his group, he was shot and killed. The
surrounded soldiers then surrendered.
Virtually the whole of the Moerdijk Bridgehead was now in German
hands. Only the 3rd section of 3-III-28 RI, which was near the village of
Lage Zwaluwe, managed to put up some resistance for a while. By 10.30
hrs, however, some six hours after the first German paratroops had landed,
there was nothing left of the Dutch military occupation of the bridgehead.
Things were not much better for the Dutch troops of the Willemsdorp
Covering Detachment to the north of the Moerdijk bridges. Surprised
and many of them still in their nightclothes, they saw German paratroops
landing around them. Most of the Dutch troops were surrounded in their
shelters to the north of Willemsdorp and forced to surrender. The com-
mander of the Wieldrecht-west sector, Captain Populier, saw a chance to
escape and entrenched with several of his men along the road from Dor-
drecht to the Moerdijk bridges. They were determined to fight to the bitter
end and when some Germans drove past in a commandeered bus, one of
the lieutenants, F.N. Maas, threw “a well-aimed hand grenade into the bus,
which stopped immediately and from which a terrible screaming arose”. It
6 ��
��
Statement by Reserve Captain J.A.J.C. Marijnen, 25 November 1946, in: Documenta-
tie Nederlands Instituut voor Militaire Historie Den Haag (DC-NIMH), Strijd Nederlands
7 It was long assumed that the group of Germans were commanded by Oberleutnant
Fritz Lamm, a German who had lived near Moerdijk from 1924 to 1938. Recent research
has produced plausible evidence that this was not the case and that the group was com-
manded by Leutnant Dietrich Lemm. The story of Fritz Lamm was based on a footnote
in “Nederland’s verdediging tegen den Duitschen aanval. De Krijgsverrichtingen op het
Zuidfront van de Vesting Holland (III) De overval”, Militaire Spectator CXVI (1947) 9. See
http://www.waroverholland.com/zfh/index.php?page=oberleutnant-fritz-lamm. Consulted
on 3 July 2008.
was to no avail, however. The Germans were moving from the north and
the east virtually unhindered towards the bridges and even Populier was
forced to surrender “in view of the hopelessness of the situation and to
prevent further needless bloodshed.”8
The Police Troops, who, under the command of Sergeant Major A. van
Almkerk, were manning the casemates on the northern bank of the Hol-
lands Diep, held out the longest. Only after the Germans had sealed off
the air ducts of Van Almkerk’s casemate, blown up the steel entrance door
and thrown a hand grenade inside, did the Sergeant Major surrender.9 The
Moerdijk bridges were now entirely in German hands. At Willemsdorp,
Tweede Tol and Catharinahoeve (a farm to the west of Tweede Tol on the
Dordtsche Kil), the successful paratroops set up their defences and waited
for events to unfold.
In the meantime, paratroops had also landed in Dordrecht. A section
of the 3rd company of the Ist battalion of the 1st Parachute Regiment land-
ed on the Zwijndrecht side of the Oude Maas. It soon had control of the
bridges, but in order to secure its position definitively, it needed the sup-
port of the other part of the company, which had landed in the fields of
De Polder (near the Krispijn district). These troops, led by Oberleutnant
Freiherr von Brandis, thus set off towards the Oude Maas. Unfortunately
for them, the 1st Pontoniers Depot Company, under the command of Re-
serve Captain H.J. Siegmund, was in the Krispijn district. One section of
this company, led by Reserve Lieutenant J. van der Houwen, subjected the
Germans to heavy fire, as a result of which von Brandis and others were
killed. The Germans, shaken by the death of their commander, were at-
tacked from the south by a group led by 57-year-old Warrant Officer H.P.
Koster. A large section of the parachute company was eventually put out
of action. Twelve Germans were killed and 82 taken prisoner.
Things were thus not looking too good for the German occupiers of
the bridges in Dordrecht. Much depended, therefore, on the part of the Ist
parachute battalion which had landed as a regiment reserve in the mid-
dle of the Island of Dordrecht. As soon as commander Bräuer heard about
the defeat of his 3rd company, he decided to go in person to the Dordrecht
bridges. Attacks on the rear of his battalion, conducted by the 2nd compa-
ny of I-28 RI, which was positioned alongside the Nieuwe Merwede, were
repelled. An attempt by the ’s‑Gravendeel group reserve to halt the Ger-
8 Battle report by the Commander of the Wieldrecht-west Sector, undated, in: DC-
9 A. van Almkerk, “Gevechtsbericht van de ‘Groep Politietroepen Willemsdorp’”, 8
June 1940, in: Enquêtecommissie regeringsbeleid 1940-1945. Verslag houdende de uitkomsten
van het onderzoek. Deel Ib (The Hague, 1949) 172 (annex 80).
Waalhaven airfield, 10 May 1940. Signals personnel from the staff of the 7th Air Division
assemble.
Dordrecht Cantonment 10 May 1940 7. Fliegerdivision

May 1940
Commander of
Fortress Holland XX
7
Dordrecht
Cantonment
1
Pontoniers and
Torpedomen Depot
14 2 2
1 16 22
2
3
4
5 22
6
1 22
2
3
man advance also failed. Some of the light weapons, as well as the single
heavy machine gun possessed by this group (a reserve made up of the 2nd
company of III-34 RI), jammed after only a few shots. After that, Bräuer’s
battalion only had to deal with the 14th pioneers company, two sections of
which were positioned on the road to the bridges. The commander of this
company, Reserve Captain W. Mantel, thought he had seen Dutch soldiers
amongst the German paratroops, and so, given that he did not want to risk
firing on his own troops, he surrendered without a struggle.10 The Ger-
mans were now able to take a firm hold of the bridges over the Oude Maas.
Generalleutnant Student had in the meantime set off from Germany
in his plane towards Waalhaven airfield. He was extremely impressed by
the German air fleet: “Wherever he looked, he could see planes, trans-
port aircraft, fighter planes and bombers. All were gliding to the west, as if
they were being drawn by invisible hands.” The aircraft were not troubled
greatly by the Dutch air defences and after a while the Moerdijk bridges
came into view. “To his great relief ”, Student was able to establish that
these bridges, as well as those over the Oude Maas, had fallen into Ger-
man hands undamaged. “This part of the plan of attack had obviously
been successful.”11 The general was, however, on the way to Rotterdam,
the third landing area for the 7th Air Division. How did the troops due to
land there fare?
The German airborne units had two objectives in the Rotterdam area:
firstly, Waalhaven airfield, vital for the supply of reinforcements, and sec-
ondly, the bridges over the Nieuwe Maas, important for the assault on
the heart of Fortress Holland. At 03.55 hrs, the first German bombers ap-
peared above the Waalhaven, bombing the Dutch buildings and combat
positions. The 3rd Fighter Squadron stationed at the airfield responded
swiftly: within fifteen minutes, eight Fokker G-I fighter aircraft had been
scrambled. The first fighter to engage the attacking aircraft was that of Re-
serve Lieutenant P. Noomen. He succeeded in shooting down two Ger-
man Heinkel He-111 bombers. In all, the Dutch fighter aircraft brought
down thirteen German planes before they had to stop because of a lack of
ammunition and fuel. One fighter crashed.
Despite the actions of the Dutch pilots, virtually all the buildings on the
airfield were ablaze shortly after 04.00 hrs. An hour later, some 670 men
from the IIIrd battalion of the 1st Parachute Regiment, led by Hauptmann
K.L. Schulz, jumped out of their planes. Some of them did not land in
10 ��
W.
��
Mantel, “Beknopt verslag krijgsverrichtingen”, 27 May 1940, in: DC-NIMH, Strijd
��Generaloberst Kurt Student, 117-118.
11 ��
Götzel,
354 chapter ten
the right place, however. Some fell into the Waalhaven and drowned while
others landed in the middle of the burning buildings and were killed in
the flames. The IIIrd battalion of the Rifles Regiment, which was there to
defend the airfield, was unable to mount an adequate defence. Most of
the combat positions were attacked in the rear and had thus been elimi-
nated. “The lack of cover at the rear for the heavy machine guns exacted
a high price”, concluded a commission of inquiry two weeks later. “When
paratroops who had landed outside the field had assembled and attacked
the positions at the rear, with hand grenades too, there was no stopping
them.” To make matters worse, the officers of the IIIrd Rifles Battalion who
were not immediately put out of action were not exactly shining examples
of strong leadership. Captain J.W. Heemskerk, for example, commander of
the 3rd company, began the retreat purely on the basis of the rumour that
the Dutch defences at Waalhaven airfield had given up the battle, while in
reality several sections were still bravely putting up a fight. Even the bat-
talion commander, Major A.J.R. de Vos, left his command post and set off
towards Rotterdam, where he was forced to surrender later that day.12
After a short battle, the airfield was in German hands; around four hun-
dred Dutch servicemen had been taken prisoner. Several attempts by the
Dutch to bomb the airfield also failed to make any difference to that fact.
An attack by three Fokker T-V bombers, escorted by six Fokker D-XXI
fighters, was averted by the actions of nine fast Messerschmidt Me‑109s,
during the course of which Reserve Lieutenant Pilot A.H. Bodaan, who
had already been hard at it since 03.45 hrs, was one of a number of men
who lost their lives.
Just as at Waalhaven airfield, there had been German air drops at 05.00
hrs in the city of Rotterdam. One spectacular action was that of a doz-
en Heinkel He-59 floatplanes which landed, with some 120 men from
the 16th Infantry Regiment on board, on both sides of the Maas bridges.
The infantrymen rowed to the shore in rubber dinghies and occupied the
abutments, the quayside and several buildings near the bridges. After this
daring exploit, they quickly received support from 42 paratroops from the
IIIrd battalion of the 1st Parachute Regiment, which had landed near the
Feyenoord stadium under the command of Oberleutnant Horst Kerfin.
In the meantime, both Generalleutnant Student and his staff and the IIIrd
battalion of the 16th Infantry Regiment, led by Oberstleutnant Dietrich
12 ��
“Rapport
��
van de commissie belast met het onderzoek betreffende de wijze, waarop–
en de omstandigheden onder welke, het Vliegpark Waalhaven in den voormiddag van 10
mei in handen van den vijand is geraakt”, 29 May 1940, in: DC-NIMH, Strijd Nederlands
Dutch soldiers take

cover during the fighting
in Rotterdam.
von Choltitz, had landed at Waalhaven airfield. The battalion moved off
immediately towards the Willems bridge, their main objective in order to
reach the northern bank of the Maas. The German troops were held up
for a while near the Afrikaanderplein by the virtually unarmed 2nd com-
pany of Quartermaster Troops and the 2nd company of III-39 RI. There
were several firefights before the Germans could move on. This gave the
Dutch troops stationed in the north of Rotterdam the opportunity to take
countermeasures. Various commanders issued orders on their own initia-
tive. Captain J. van Rhijn, for example, commander of the machine-gun
company of III-39 RI, received orders from staging commander Lieu-
tenant Colonel P.J. Gaillard to, “with the machine-gun company, occupy
the northern bank of the Maas facing the Noordereiland, an island in the
river Maas, and prevent more German floatplanes from landing on the
Maas.” Van Rhijn then used several heavy machine guns to open fire on
the Boompjes, as a result of which the German troops that were there
356 chapter ten
had to withdraw toward the bridges.13 Partly because of this, the German
bridgehead on the northern bank of the Maas was becoming smaller all
the time. A small group led by Oberleutnant Kerfin was eventually able to
hold its position in the office block of the Nationale Levensverzekerings�
bank. When von Choltitz arrived at the Maas bridges with his battalion,
however, Dutch fire had made it impossible for the Germans to cross the
river. He thus decided to set up a defence on the Noordereiland.
The daring German airborne operation was a complete success. Both
Waalhaven airfield and the bridges had fallen in a usable state into the
hands of the Airborne Corps. The main reason for this German success
was the fact that the Dutch army leadership had not given sufficient con-
sideration to the possibility of a large-scale deployment of airborne troops.
Furthermore, Lieutenant General Van Andel was of the opinion that the
southern front of Fortress Holland lay in the second line, because it was
sufficiently protected by the troops on the Maas and in the Peel-Raam
Position. He did not, therefore, feel it was necessary to alert the troops
stationed there on 9 May. For the Dutch troops at the bridges and at Waal-
haven airfield, many of whose munitions had been stored per company,
the actions of the German paratroops in the morning of 10 May came as a
great surprise. This meant that, on the whole, they were not able to mount
an adequate defence, even though a parachute unit landing in unfamiliar
surroundings can easily run into difficulties when faced with robust and
prompt action by the defending forces. Such robust action was demon-
strated by a small number of energetic Dutch units in Dordrecht, which
put a large part of a German company out of action, but that victory was
not able to prevent the success of the airborne operation.
Consolidation of the German positions
The fact that German troops had control of the bridges over the Hollands
Diep, the Oude and the Nieuwe Maas and of Waalhaven airfield did not
mean, of course, that they could rest on their laurels. First of all, they need-
ed to prepare for any Dutch counterattacks. After Generalleutnant Student
had arrived at the Waalhaven, he went almost immediately with his chief
of staff, Major H. Trettner, and a few officers to the south of Rotterdam,
where he set up his command post in a school. Further reinforcements
were flown in constantly throughout the day. Some of those landing at the
13 ��
J.
��
van Rhijn, “Gevechtsbericht van het gevecht op den 10den mei 1940”, 12 mei
Waalhaven were the IInd battalion of the 2nd Parachute Regiment and the
rest of the 16th Infantry Regiment. The 7th Air Division was also reinforced
with troops which had originally been destined for the area around The
Hague, but had not been able to land there. The island of IJsselmonde was
quickly cleared of Dutch troops and, according to plan, the commander
of 16th Infantry Regiment, Oberst Hans Kreysing, was given the command
in this part of the area of operations of the air division. The Ist battalion
of his regiment was charged with the defence of the northern bank of the
Oude Maas, where his men relieved the IInd battalion of the 1st Parachute
Regiment, which had landed earlier. Two companies from the IInd battal-
ion of the 16th Infantry Regiment were protecting the western bank of the
river Noord, where Generalleutnant Student had been shocked to discover
a bridge he did not know about at Alblasserdam, while the IIIrd battalion
held its positions on the Noordereiland in Rotterdam. With the intention
of personally leading any battles for the bridge over the Noord, he moved
his command post to Rijsoord. Within a short time, German units had also
occupied the other bridges which provided access to the island of IJssel-
monde. The bridge at Spijkenisse was sealed off by 09.00 hrs. Student sent
the IInd battalion of the 2nd Parachute Regiment to the vicinity of the bridge
at Barendrecht. The undefended bridge fell into German hands unchal-
lenged, which meant that the troops belonging to the Kil Group no longer
had access to IJsselmonde.
A weak point in the German deployment was formed by the bridges
at Dordrecht, where Dutch troops were keeping the Germans under con-
stant fire. Second Lieutenant J.B. Plasschaert and Sergeant Major A. van
Vlierden were making themselves particularly useful in this respect. Sup-
ported by only a handful of soldiers and with only three light machine
guns, they waged a constant firefight against the enemy at very short
range. In the course of the fighting, soldiers regularly risked their lives,
such as torpedoman C.M. Oome, who was fatally wounded when he vol-
unteered to go and get ammunition. The actions of these Dutch troops
were of such concern to Student that he moved the IInd battalion of the 2nd
Parachute Regiment to Zwijndrecht, apart from the men who stayed at the
bridge at Barendrecht. The situation nevertheless remained extremely pre-
carious for the Germans. First of all, Dutch counterattacks were expected
from the south by elements of the Kil Group and by units stationed in
Noord-Brabant. Furthermore, Generalleutnant Student received word that
evening that there was a large concentration of Dutch forces in Alblasser-
waard. Would he and his troops be able to hold out until the XXVIth
358 chapter ten
Corps arrived? The answer to that question would depend on the Dutch
countermeasures.
Actions by the border battalions and the Kil Group
There were two border battalions stationed in the west of Brabant, the 3rd
and the 6th, which, in accordance with the plan, set off after the German
invasion towards Willemstad and Moerdijk, respectively. At 05.30 hrs,
the 6th Border Battalion, under the command of Major J.F.W. Hendriksz,
was informed of the landing of paratroops at the Moerdijk bridges. Half
an hour earlier, on the basis of the instructions which dated back to the
mobilisation period, the battalion had destroyed or blocked all the roads
leading south, although nobody in the battalion understood why this was
necessary, given that the Netherlands was being attacked from the east.
Once the battalion had set off towards the Moerdijk bridges, Major
Hendriksz did not do a great deal more. He did not mount a concen-
trated attack, but positioned his battalion around what had in the mean-
time become the German bridgehead. As a result, a bombardment by four
Dutch Fokker C-X aircraft at 17.15 hrs was not exploited. The following
day, promising reports were received from the district commander of the
Marechaussee in Breda, who said that French troops were on the way.
The commander of the 2nd Light Armoured Brigade, colonel P.E.A. Dario,
had already decided to send a detachment under the command of chef
d’escadron G. Michon to the Moerdijk bridges. Michon met Major Hen-
driksz just to the north of Breda and they decided to launch an attack on
the German positions that same day.14
In the evening of 11 May, the French troops marched northwards. The
detachment was spotted by Luftwaffe reconnaissance planes, however.
Generalmajor R. Putzier, the commander of the section of the Luftwaffe
that was operating over the Netherlands, decided to take immediate ac-
tion. When the French armoured vehicles arrived in the village of Zeven-
bergschen Hoek, a large number of Stukas attacked them. One of the
company commanders from the 6th Border Battalion gave the following
eye-witness account:
The German planes spotted the French column and my command post and
there was then a bombardment that destroyed everything around me. Any-
14 ��
V.E.
��
Nierstrasz, “De Franse en de Belgische operatieplannen van 1939 en 1940 in
verband met de Nederlandse verdediging van de zuidelijke provinciën en de opmars van
het Franse VIIe leger naar Noord-Brabant en Zeeland in mei 1940”, Orgaan van de Vereni-
ging ter beoefening van krijgswetenschappen, IV (1949-1950) 144-145.
thing that was not demolished was set on fire. For an hour and a half, we
were bombed and subjected to a hail of machine-gun fire from the air. The
entire village was razed to the ground.15
Michon decided after that to abort the attack. Hendriksz, too, saw lit-
tle point in any further attempts to recapture the Moerdijk Bridge-
head. He pulled his battalion back behind the small Noord-Brabant
river, the Mark.16 After the war, General Putzier described the actions of
the Luftwaffe as “the air force’s greatest success in the operations in the
Netherlands”.17
The 3rd Border Battalion had in the meantime displaced to Willemstad.

This battalion, which was commanded by Major A.G.C. Reijers and which
had been weakened in April because it had had to give up two sections to
the Border Rifles Battalion, reached the Hoekse Waard during the night of
10 May. Here, it received orders to cross the Oude Maas in order to thus
be able to recapture Waalhaven airfield. The plan that Major Reijers made
for this was a good one. His 1st and 2nd companies would be taken across
the Oude Maas near Heinenoord, after which they would have to advance
towards the Waalhaven. His 4th company was to cross the river on the ferry
at Puttershoek so that it could then execute a flank attack on the German
units north of the bridge at Barendrecht. The 3rd company of the border
battalion was one of those kept on standby for storming the bridge.
The crossing of the Oude Maas began at 06.00 hrs. Once they had ar-
rived on the northern bank of the river, they quickly encountered Ger-
man machine-gun fire. Almost immediately, panic broke out among the
tired soldiers of the 1st and 2nd companies, “which made it impossible for
the company commander and the section commanders to get their sub-
ordinates to do their duty”. With men throwing aside their weapons and
equipment, it was a matter of “sauve qui peut”.18 Many soldiers disap-
peared into the reeds in the river forelands, others swam across the Maas.
15 ��
A.M.J.
��
Mol, “Verslag van de krijgsverrichtingen van de commandant van de 2e com-
pagnie van het 6e Grensbataljon”, 1 July 1940, in: DC-NIMH, Strijd Nederlands Grondge-
16 ��
��
J.F.W. Hendriksz, “Oorlog over de krijgsverrichtingen van het 6e grensbataljon in
Noord-Brabant”, October 1940, in: Enquêtecommissie Regeringsbeleid. Part Ib, 173-175
(annex 81).
17 ��
Cited
��
in: P.G.H. Maalderink, “De open achterpoort van de Vesting Holland.��
Het
��
relaas van de krijgsverrichtingen op het Zuidfront van de Vesting Holland tegen de Duitse
luchtlandingseenheden in mei 1940”, Militaire Spectator, CL (1981) 207.
18 ��
��
Th. van Leeuwen, “Dagboek van 10 tot 15 mei 1940”, 17 May 1940, in: DC-NIMH,
360 chapter ten
Casualties from
Major D.P. Ravelli’s
II-28 RI after the
failed assault on
the bridges of
Dordrecht on the
night of 10 May.
After these events, the companies were so demoralised that any new at-
tempt to cross the Oude Maas was impossible.
The assault on the bridge at Barendrecht failed too. Once he had
learned from the mayor of Heerjansdam “that Barendrecht was occupied
by strong German units”, the somewhat lethargic commander of the 4th
company, Reserve Captain G.J.A. Manders, decided to do an about-turn,
partly in view of “the over-exhaustion of the troops, (...) as well as the fact
that there was no communication at all with my battalion commander”.19
This meant that the storming of the bridge, which started at 12.30 hrs,
stood no chance whatsoever. Troops who dared to make it onto the
500-metre-long bridge were shot down mercilessly. The counterattack by
the 3rd Border Battalion thus achieved nothing.
19 ��
G.J.A.
��
Manders, “Verslag krijgsverrichtingen 10-15 mei 1940”, in: DC-NIMH, Strijd
In the meantime, the commander of the Kil Group, Colonel Van Andel,
had not been idle. When, during the morning of 10 May, he began to feel
that Dordrecht would be lost, he decided to order Major D.P. Ravelli’s
IInd battalion of the 28th Infantry Regiment to cross the Dordtsche Kil at
’s-Gravendeel in order to relieve the town. It took a long time before the
troops were assembled. It was not until 7 o’clock in the evening that the
thousand or so men of the reinforced battalion were able to cross the Kil
on the Wieldrecht ferry. The advance progressed smoothly after that. But
once darkness had fallen, Ravelli called a halt, to the considerable displeas-
ure of Colonel Van Andel, who gave the order: “Push on without delay!”.
Ravelli, however, considered an advance in a north-easterly direction—
towards the centre of Dordrecht—to be unwise and decided to go straight
towards the bridges over the Oude Maas. Everything seemed fine until
02.30 hrs, when the forward company came under fire from two sides.
Mass confusion ensued. There were cries of “Go back! Go back!” and many
began firing indiscriminately. “With the greatest difficulty, the officers
managed to get their own men to stop firing. We were on several occa-
sions in serious danger of being shot by our own men”, said Ravelli later.20
Among the dead were a company commander, Reserve Captain W.J.C. van
den Bosch, one lieutenant and nineteen NCOs and other ranks. A number
of soldiers fled back to the Wieldrecht ferry and spread the word in the Kil
Group that II-28 RI had been “destroyed”.
That report was somewhat premature. From his battalion, Ravelli man-
aged to form what more or less constituted a unit. On the morning of
11 May, he tried for the second time to reach the bridges over the Oude
Maas. This time, his battalion was not met by machine-gun fire, but by
fifty Dutch soldiers waving white flags and shouting “Come on Holland!”
and “Don’t shoot!”. Ravelli was suspicious and went, strangely enough
with virtually all his staff officers, to size up the situation. It did indeed
turn out to be an act of treachery. “When I first got very close, I noticed
German soldiers on the W[est] side of the road. One of them approached
me and said: ‘You are a prisoner!’”21 Thus bereft of their officers, most of
the soldiers of II‑28 RI retreated. The bridgehead at the Wieldrecht ferry
was evacuated in great chaos and the Dutch troops who were still posi-
tioned between Dordrecht and the Moerdijk bridges pulled back to the
city in the evening of 11 May. The Island of Dordrecht was thus cleared,
20 ��
D.P.
��
Ravelli, “Verslag betreffende de krijgsverrichtingen in het tijdvak 10-17 mei”,
29 May 1940, in: DC-NIMH, Strijd Nederlands Grondgebied, box 458A, file 31.
21 ��
��
Rapport by Ravelli, 10 June 1940, in: DC-NIMH, Strijd Nederlands Grondgebied,
box 485A, file 31.
362 chapter ten
apart from the city itself. Maybe the Light Division, which was advancing
from the east, could offer more solace.
The Light Division takes action
After General H.G. Winkelman had placed the Ist Corps at the disposal
of the Commander of Fortress Holland, the Light Division was the last
remaining part of the strategic reserve of the Dutch army. The division’s
commander, Colonel H.C. van der Bijl, led what was regarded in the mo-
bilisation period as the most up-to-date part of the Dutch army. But much
had changed since the outbreak of war. On 10 May, the division had been
stripped of its armoured vehicles, its two hussars-motorcyclist regiments
and part of its mobile artillery. Consequently, its combat power was not
much greater than that of a reinforced infantry regiment.
At 06.00 hrs on 10 May, Van der Bijl received orders from Winkelman
to move his division to Fortress Holland, even though many had expected
the Light Division to fight its battles in Noord-Brabant. The commander
of the division had barely responded to this order when he was notified
by telephone that the Moerdijk bridges had fallen into German hands. In
response, Winkelman placed Van der Bijl’s troops under the command of
the Fortress Holland commander, Lieutenant General Van Andel, “to be
deployed if necessary to occupy the northern bank of the Merwede from
Gorinchem to Dordrecht”.22 At the Light Division’s headquarters, however,
the words “if necessary” were not received and Van der Bijl thus ordered
his troops to occupy the Merwede front. This order also failed to reach all
the units, as a result of which confusion arose to the north of the Merwede.
This confusion was not helped when, in the afternoon of 10 May, Win-
kelman authorised Lieutenant General Van Andel to deploy the Light Di-
vision against the German occupation of Waalhaven airfield. Once again,
Van der Bijl, who was in Molenaarsgraaf at the time, received new orders.
He was now to attack the German troops at IJsselmonde by way of the
bridge over the Noord at Alblasserdam and recapture Waalhaven airfield.
Furthermore, a cyclist battalion was to be made available to the canton-
ment commander in Dordrecht. Van der Bijl was not advised of the situ-
ation to the west of the Noord or at the bridges over the Oude Maas at
Dordrecht. Given that the commander of the Light Division knew that the
Moerdijk bridges had fallen into German hands and also that there was
heavy fighting in Rotterdam, he should have realised that it was vitally im-
Calmeyer and Nierstrasz, Zuidfront, 63.

22 ��
��
Pre-war German military map which shows that the 7th Air Division did not know about the
opening of the bridge over the Noord at Alblasserdam at the beginning of the war.
364 chapter ten
portant that a strong bridgehead be established as quickly as possible to

the west of the river Noord in order to ensure the success of the subse-
quent actions by his division.
Van der Bijl did not act with the necessary urgency, however: the bat-
talion from the Cyclist Regiment (III-2 RW) which had to go to Dordrecht
did not set off to the bridge over the Noord until 21.30 hrs. Half an hour
earlier, the division commander had gone in person to assess the situation
and had heard from a local policeman that the western bank of the Noord
had been occupied by German troops during the course of the afternoon
and that they had in all likelihood planted explosives in the abutments.
The bridge guard confirmed the story.23 Instead of the IIIrd battalion of the
2nd Cyclist Regiment mounting an immediate attack on what were proba-
bly only weak German positions on the other side of the bridge–the com-
panies from the IInd battalion of the 16th Infantry Regiment sent urgently
to the bridge by Student had indeed not yet arrived–Van der Bijl ordered
the commander of III-2 RW to go to Dordrecht on the ferry at Papen-
drecht. A missed opportunity!
The following day, Colonel Van der Bijl decided to have a go at recap-
turing the bridge over the Noord. According to his plan, one group con-
sisting of the 1st Cyclist Regiment would cross the Noord to the north of
Alblasserdam and another group, consisting of the 2nd Cyclist Regiment,
should gain control of the bridge over this river. The commander of the
latter regiment, Lieutenant Colonel H. Mijsberg, put two companies from
his IInd battalion, the 1st and the 3rd, in position on either side of the ap-
proach road to the bridge. At 03.45 hrs, one section from each company
crossed the river in small boats, to the north and south of the bridge, re-
spectively. Their mission was to attack the German troops at the bridge,
estimated to number between 20 and 35, from two sides. The crossing it-
self was a success.
After that, the entire operation ran aground. The German troops were
alerted by the supporting fire from the eastern bank, both sections were
faced with a 30-metre wide stretch of water in their advance to the bridge
and the northern section came under heavy fire from friendly troops. The
commander, Reserve Lieutenant L. Falkenburg, was seriously wounded as
a result. At 08.00 hrs, an attempt was made to storm the bridge from the
Alblasserwaard, but it failed miserably. The Luftwaffe then proceeded to
bomb Alblasserdam, thus severely demoralising the Dutch troops; no-one
23 �Ibid, 64-65.
knew how to defend themselves against such air attacks. Eventually, the
sections on the western bank withdrew to their own side of the river.24
Van der Bijl then ordered the commander of the 2nd Cyclist Regiment
to cross the Noord further north, at the Kinderdijk ferry. But because the
Germans had by then reinforced their troops, this attempt failed as well.
And what about the 1st Cyclist Regiment? This regiment had already found
it extremely difficult to reach the bank of the Noord. This was because it
had already been taking up positions on the Merwede front when the or-
der came in to cross the Noord. There were then traffic jams on the narrow
roads in the Alblasserwaard because of columns crossing each other’s paths
and officers losing their way. Public road maps often proved more reliable
than military maps. Despite these setbacks, Reserve Lieutenant Colonel
R.C. van Gennep led the regiment in the attempt to cross the Noord, but
to no avail. The machine-gun fire from the reinforced German units was
too heavy. “There is no chance of success”, said Van Gennep in his battle re-
port: “The well-aimed enemy fire is causing losses and is completely cover-
ing the dyke. It also turns out that the Germans have total air supremacy.”25
After all these failures, Colonel Van der Bijl decided that
(…) the crossing and the execution of the further task of the Light Divi-
sion without the reinforcement of armoured vehicles, anti-aircraft defences
and/or aircraft would be impossible without extremely high losses, and even
then success would be doubtful in the extreme.26
At 10.15 hrs, the Commander of Fortress Holland, Lieutenant General

Van Andel, approved the decision to stop the attempts by the Light Divi-
sion to cross the river Noord. He now ordered Colonel Van der Bijl by
telephone to hold the Noord, clear all German troops from the Island of
Dordrecht and then to seize the Waalhaven via Wieldrecht, ’s-Gravendeel
and Barendrecht. In other words, what had not been possible by means
of a direct route, the Light Division still had to attempt by way of a con-
siderable detour. But at the same time Van der Bijl now received two ad-
ditional orders: to hold the Noord and to seize the Island of Dordrecht.
He had to split his forces and, before launching a concentrated attack on
the Waalhaven, have his troops fan out over the Island of Dordrecht to
destroy the German forces there. In order to execute all this, Colonel Van
der Bijl formed two new combat groups: firstly, a ‘Holding Group’ and,
24 ��
“Reconstructie
��
van het Dagboek van de Lt.D. van 10 t/m 15 mei 1940”, undated
[1940], in: DC-NIMH, Strijd Nederlands Grondgebied, box 529, file 3.
25 ��
��
“Gevechtsbericht van C.-1 R.W.”, 5 June 1940, in: DC-NIMH, Strijd Nederlands
26 ��
“Reconstructie
��
van het Dagboek van de Lt.D. van 10 t/m 15 mei 1940”.
German airborne troops in Rijsoord look at the results of the air attack on Alblasserdam
on 11 May.
Paratroops at the ’s-Gravendeelsedijk defending the approach to the Zwijndrecht bridge

in Dordrecht.
secondly, a ‘Main Group’. The task of the Holding Group, under the com-
mand of Lieutenant Colonel Van Gennep, was to prevent German troops
from crossing the Noord. The Main Group comprised the entire 2nd Cy-
clist Regiment, the IInd battalion of the 1st Cyclist Regiment and the IInd
battalion of the Mobile Artillery Corps, and was commanded by the com-
mander of what was known as the Shadow Staff, Lieutenant Colonel J.J.
van Diepenbrugge.27 The group was given the task of recapturing the Is-
land of Dordrecht and then Waalhaven airfield.
The staff leading this operation consisted of only four officers, while
the full staff of the Light Division, including Van der Bijl, made their way
to Bleskensgraaf, which was further to the rear. There were other things
wrong too. Van Diepenbrugge, for instance, only had limited information
about the situation on the Island of Dordrecht, information which was
mainly based on what the Commander of Fortress Holland had report-
ed to Van der Bijl. Furthermore, the Dordrecht cantonment commander,
Lieutenant Colonel Mussert, was not under the command of the Light Di-
vision and no contact had been made with Colonel Van Andel, the com-
mander of the Kil Group, in whose area the action was actually to take
place. Van Diepenbrugge also decided that the attack, which was to be led
by Lieutenant Colonel Mijsberg, the commander of 2nd Cyclist Regiment,
should take place over a wide front of some nine kilometres, without any
point of main effort and with hardly any artillery.
On top of all this, the actions of the German Luftwaffe were having a
disruptive effect. The headquarters of the 2nd Cyclist Regiment and the IInd
battalion of that regiment were, for example, being bombed constantly.
“It’s not producing many casualties”, said Mijsberg, but “it is, however, de-
moralising the troops because no countermeasures can be taken”.28 Partly
because of this, there was not much hope of an orderly crossing at Papen-
drecht. In the meantime, the mood in Dordrecht had become extremely
tense. One commander reported, for instance, that “in Dordrecht there
were numerous centres (groups of houses) from which enemy troops
opened fire on our men”.29 Rumours were rife about a highly active body
of ‘fifth columnists’ in Lieutenant Colonel Mussert’s city. And anyway,
could someone with the name of Mussert actually be trusted? In this un-
certain situation, the troops of the demoralised Light Division began their
all-important but nonetheless poorly prepared counterattack. The ques-
See: “De Afzonder-
27 ��
��
The Shadow Staff was set up in case the Light Division was split.��
��
lijke Staf ”, Militaire Spectator, CXI (1942) 5.
28 ��
��
H. Mijsberg, “Verslag van de gebeurtenissen van 10 mei t/m 15 mei”, 1 June 1940,
29 ��
“Reconstructie
��
368 chapter ten
tion was very much whether this attack would return the southern front
of Fortress Holland to Dutch hands.
Lieutenant Colonel Van Diepenbrugge, as mentioned previously, or-
dered his troops to move southwards over a wide front. In the eastern part
of the Island of Dordrecht, where there were only small numbers of Ger-
man soldiers, the Ist and IIIrd battalion of the 2nd Cyclist Regiment made
good progress. At around 10.00 hrs, the Dutch troops had moved so far
south that they halted to give the troops in the western part of the Island
of Dordrecht the chance to link up. In that part of the island, however,
things were going wrong. The IInd battalion of the 1st Cyclist Regiment,
led by Major H.C. Kloppenburg, was supposed to launch an attack “in a
southerly direction, in order to establish communications with friend-
ly troops who were to cross the Dordtsche Kil at Wieldrecht”. Initially,
however, the promised artillery support was not forthcoming, and it was
mainly friendly troops that were hit when firing did eventually com-
mence.30 When the battalion wanted to get moving, it ran into an unex-
pected, but no less powerful, German attack.
What had happened? Generalleutnant Student had already been aware
on 10 May of the extremely precarious position of his troops at the bridges
over the Oude Maas in Dordrecht. It was thus clear to him on 12 May that
“the situation in Dordrecht could only be rectified by a German attack”.
His plan of attack was that a German unit, led by Oberstleutnant John de
Boer and consisting of approximately 560 officers and men, would exe-
cute an enveloping movement and thus isolate the city from the rest of the
island. The Dutch troops in the city could then be eliminated.
Most of Student’s plan worked. After the German troops had executed
their enveloping movement, they entered Dordrecht from the south-east.
A number of chaotic but fierce street battles ensued. The outcome of this
was that in any event the whole of the south-eastern part of the city came
under German control. “The enemy’s hand had been forced. Given the
limited space, he was no longer in a position to put his numerical supe-
riority to good effect.”31 Nothing more came of the attack by Major Klop-
penburg’s cyclist battalion.
Meanwhile, the troops in the eastern part of the Island of Dordrecht
were still awaiting the arrival of the battalion in question. They were not
informed that a German attack was under way. Had they been told, they
would probably have set off towards the Dordtsche Kil, thus cutting off
30 ��
H.C. Kloppenburg, “Gevechtsbericht 11/12 mei 1940”, in: DC-NIMH, Strijd Neder-
��
Götzel, Generaloberst Kurt Student, 133-134 and 138-139.
31 ��
��
At daybreak on 14 May, two civilians, W.
Gorter and J.G. van Namen, crossed from
Zwijndrecht to Dordrecht to mediate in the
surrender of the town. Late in the afternoon
of 20 May, they repeated their crossing for
photographer C. Lips (below).
370 chapter ten
the German troops at the Moerdijk bridges from the rest of the Airborne
Corps. There would in any case then have been a chance of recapturing the
Moerdijk bridges. As it was, they stayed where they were until 17.00 hrs.
By 12.00 hrs, it was clear to the Commander of Fortress Holland that
the actions on the Island of Dordrecht were not being led properly. Some-
what incensed, he rang the commander of the Light Division and ordered
him to go immediately to the battle zone and personally take charge of
the operations. Van der Bijl and his staff thus left Bleskensgraaf for the
command post of the Shadow Staff to the south-east of Dordrecht. Here,
the colonel gave the following order to Van Diepenbrugge: “I want you to
mop up the Krispijn area immediately and robustly and I want you to do
it now.” Van der Bijl then disappeared without saying where he was going
to set up his command post.32 Van Diepenbrugge’s mission was conspicu-
ous in its vagueness; no clear point of main effort had been given. At 17.00
hrs, Van der Bijl sent a captain from his staff with another order for Van
Diepenbrugge: the Ist and IIIrd battalions of the 2nd Cyclist Regiment were
to go to Tweede Tol. The undertaking was successful at first, but heavy
artillery fire from the Germans halted the attack: the Moerdijk bridges re-
mained out of reach of the Light Division.
The actions of Van der Bijl and his division had been disappointing.
Not only had they failed to recapture the bridge over the Noord at Al-
blasserdam even though it had been possible, but they had also taken in-
sufficient action against the German troops on the Island of Dordrecht.
The Light Brigade’s action in this area had all the hallmarks of a mopping-
up operation, with an advance over a wide front. Van der Bijl had also
deemed it unnecessary to lead the actions himself. He left this to Lieuten-
ant Colonel Van Diepenbrugge, who only had a small staff and was una-
ware of the actual situation on the Island of Dordrecht. A number of very
real possibilities of bringing the southern front of Fortress Holland back
under Dutch control had thus been missed by the Light Division.
Die Panzer arrive on time
The chances of any Dutch success on the Island of Dordrecht became slim
in the extreme when, at 16.45 hrs on 12 May, the first light armoured ve-
hicles of a reconnaissance battalion of the 9th Panzer Division passed the
32 ��
��
J.J. van Diepenbrugge, “Verslag van de Afz.��
��
Staf-Lichte Divisie over de handelingen
op 10, 11, 12, 13 en 14 mei 1940”, 20 May 1940, in: DC-NIMH, Strijd Nederlands Grondge-
The commander of the 1st Parachute Regiment, Oberst Bruno Bräuer (standing) at his
command post at Tweede Tol.
Planning and coordinating in the field, near Rotterdam.

372 chapter ten
Moerdijk bridges. Oberst Bräuer, commander of the 1st Parachute Regi-

ment, sent Ensign C.A.J. Marijs, whom he had taken prisoner earlier that
day, to “the commander in charge of the troops which were operating on
the Island of Dordrecht” to ask him whether he intended to put up any
further resistance. He added to this that any further resistance would be
useless “since an armoured division was ready to move the following day”.33
Colonel Van der Bijl had no intention of giving up the fight, but none-
theless sent an officer to verify the report by Ensign Marijs that German
tanks had come across the Moerdijk bridges. The officer confirmed the
report, whereupon Van der Bijl sent word to the Commander of Fortress
Holland. Van Andel absolutely refused to believe the report about the ar-
moured vehicles, however, and assured the commander of the Light Divi-
sion that French tanks would break through near the Moerdijk bridges
the next morning. Because of that, he insisted that the Wieldrecht ferry
should in any event be under Dutch control in the course of the morning
of 13 May.
Lieutenant General Van Andel received more strange reports in the
evening of 12 May. The situation in Dordrecht, for instance, had become
so chaotic—everyone was shooting at everyone else—that many were talk-
ing about treason. Cantonment commander Mussert was also providing
little in the way of leadership and was thus drawing suspicion towards
himself that he was in league with the Germans. Consequently, Captain
G. van der Mark, Mussert’s aide-de-camp, rang the commander of the Kil
Group in a state of mild panic at 18.45 hrs, with the following message:
A chaotic situation prevails in Dordrecht. (...) Lieutenant Colonel Mussert is
not providing any leadership and is not trusted by anyone. I cannot go on. If
Lieutenant Colonel Mussert is not relieved of his command, Dordrecht will
be lost.34
Acting on his own authority, even though he had no powers whatsoever

in respect of the Dordrecht cantonment commander, Colonel Van Andel,
commander of the Kil Group, relieved Mussert of his position and asked
Colonel Van der Bijl to appoint a new commander. When the Command-
er of Fortress Holland got to hear of this course of events, he was extreme-
ly surprised. Lieutenant General Van Andel had “complete confidence”
in the reliability of Lieutenant Colonel Mussert and therefore refused to
sanction the measure by the commander of the Kil Group. On the contra-
33 ��
“Reconstructie
��
34 ��
J.A.G.
��
van Andel, “Gevechtsbericht van 10 t/m 14 mei 1940”, 1 July 1940, in: DC-
ry, he placed all Dutch troops on the Island of Dordrecht, including Lieu-
tenant Colonel Mussert, under the command of Colonel Van der Bijl.35
The commander of the Light Division had in the meantime set off from
his command post in Dubbeldam (on the Island of Dordrecht) to Lieu-
tenant Colonel Mussert’s cantonment office. However, given that there
were known to be German troops in the south-eastern part of Dordrecht,
Van der Bijl decided to travel by way of the railway bridge west of Slie-
drecht and the Papendrecht ferry. When he arrived at the ferry, however,
it turned out to be no longer in service. Van der Bijl then decided, hav-
ing consulted the commander of the Kil Group by telephone, to plan the
envisaged counterattack in Papendrecht. The plan for this attack was ul-
timately that the area between Wieldrecht and Tweede Tol had to be re-
turned to Dutch control, after which action could be taken either against
the German bridgehead in Dordrecht or against Willemsdorp.36 Although
the first German tanks had passed the Moerdijk bridges, Van der Bijl and
Van Andel were thus still in two minds. The conclusion they did not draw
from the critical situation was that all available assets had to be deployed
to recapture Willemsdorp in order to make it impossible for the German
tanks to link up with the airborne troops.
For the new attack, Van der Bijl split the Main Group of the Light Divi-
sion into two: an eastern attack group under the command of Lieutenant
Colonel Van Diepenbrugge, made up of the Ist and IIIrd battalion of the
2nd Cyclist Regiment, would attack along the Zeedijk towards Tweede Tol,
and a western attack group led by Lieutenant Colonel Mijsberg would rid
the Krispijn district of German troops. The latter task again resulted in a
number of desperate street battles. The attack by the 2nd Cyclist Regiment
was nipped in the bud. Almost immediately after the Dutch troops had
sprung into action, German tanks and aircraft opened fire on them. The
bombardment lasted for an hour and a quarter and it was solely down to
the cool-headed actions of Captain J.L.H.A. Antoni that the Dutch rank
and file remained calm. Suddenly tanks appeared. The yellow recogni-
tion panels were probably mistaken for orange, in other words friendly
markings, because “suddenly the word was spreading—‘French tanks!’
(...) Many and still more ran behind the dyke towards the tanks; sud-
denly the foremost tank fired, fatally wounding Cornet J. Offringa and
35 ��
��
W. Thomson, “Verslag van de krijgsverrichtingen van 10 tot en met 14 mei 1940 in
de Vesting Holland”, February 1941, in: DC-NIMH, Strijd Nederlands Grondgebied, box
479, file 5.
36 ��
��
The linkup is achieved: at the end of the afternoon of 12 May, the forward detachment of
the 9th Panzer Division reached the paratroops at the Moerdijk bridges.
After passing the Moerdijk bridge, a Panzerkampfwagen II rolls past Tweede Tol in the early
morning of 13 May. In the group on the right, Oberst Bruno Bräuer (with flat cap).
others.”37 The IInd battalion of the Mobile Artillery Corps responded

swiftly: heavy fire brought the German tanks to a halt. Tactical air sup-
port from the Luftwaffe broke the resistance, however. Lieutenant Colo-
nel Van Diepenbrugge requested permission from the commander of the
Light Division to evacuate the Island of Dordrecht, which he was granted.
That was because Van der Bijl was afraid that what was still left of his divi-
sion would be destroyed by the tanks and aircraft. Leaving a great deal of
equipment behind, the Main Group of the Light Division was back on the
north side of the Merwede at 13.00 hrs.
The bridgehead that the Kil Group had by then established at Wiel-
drecht was also dispersed. The 4th company of the 3rd Border Battalion,
which had been sent to the eastern bank of the Dordtsche Kil after its ac-
tions in Heerjansdam, was completely helpless against the German tanks.
Twelve Dutch soldiers were killed, many were wounded and some forty
men, including Captain Manders, were taken prisoner.
The German tanks rolled on towards Dordrecht. All kinds of barri-
cades were set up in the city. Once again, some Dutch soldiers thought
that French tanks were approaching. Reserve Lieutenant C.M.R. David-
son even got some soldiers to wave Dutch flags when a tank came round
the corner at his position. The German tank commander gave a friendly
wave back and then opened “overwhelming fire” on the Dutchmen.38 A
few Dutch units in the city fought bravely, such as a group led by Lieuten-
ant Plasschaert, mentioned previously, and Ensign W.C.H. Dekker, who,
entirely on his own, got an antitank gun into position, blasted a hole in
a paving-stone barricade and put two armoured vehicles out of action.
Because of this, the German tank crews felt threatened in the streets of
Dordrecht and pulled back. The Dutch defenders thus got an opportuni-
ty to rebuild the barricades. However, Lieutenant Colonel Mussert, who
had been “in a highly nervous state”39 all day, still refused to believe that
there were any German tanks and insisted that roads be opened for traffic.
“You’re seeing things”, he said to several officers of the Cyclist Regiment,
thus once again fanning the flames of suspicion about himself.40
Colonel Van der Bijl, who had arrived in Dordrecht the night before,
decided in the afternoon of 13 May to evacuate the city of Dordrecht
on the basis of the many reports that were coming in about troops who
were “over-exhausted, had suffered very heavy losses and were severely
37 ��
W.A.
��
van den Bosch, “Gevechtsbericht van het gevecht op den 13 mei 1940”, in:
38 ��
��
39 ��
“Reconstructie
��
40 ��
��
376 chapter ten
demoralised”.41 During the night of 13 May, the entire Island of Dordrecht

was evacuated by the Dutch troops. The remainder of the Light Division
took up positions behind the Noord and the Merwede in the course of the
morning, wondering constantly whether the fighting had gone so badly
because there had been some treachery at play. In Sliedrecht in the after-
noon of 14 May, an overstrained reserve lieutenant from the 2nd Cyclist
Regiment, A.J. Kruithof, shot and killed Lieutenant Colonel Mussert. The
cantonment commander’s last words were: “They were out to get me be-
cause my name is Mussert …”.42
Now that the Island of Dordrecht was lost to the Dutch troops, they
had to pull out all the stops to destroy the Moerdijk bridges and thus halt
the advance of the rest of the 9th Panzer Division. The commander of the
Kil Group, Colonel Van Andel, thus received orders in the morning of 13
May to “fire with all the strength of all the artillery of the Kil Group (...)
on both Moerdijk bridges and keep this up as long as possible”. The fire
from the guns of the Kil Group had hardly any effect, however.43
There was now only one possibility remaining: an aerial bombardment.
The Dutch Military Air Arm only had one medium bomber left, however:
a Fokker T-V from the Bomber Squadron of the 1st Aviation Regiment. At
03.40 hrs on 13 May, the commander of this squadron, Captain J.G. Sis-
singh, received urgent orders from the Commander of the Air Defence,
Lieutenant General P.W. Best, to fit a Fokker T-V with two 300kg bombs
and prepare it for departure. At 05.05 hrs, Best ordered the road bridge
at Moerdijk to be bombed “with the greatest possible precision”. Protec-
tion could be provided by two Fokker G-I fighter aircraft. “The precision
bombing of the bridge is now of the utmost importance”, the air defence
commander added to the airmen.
41 ��
“Reconstructie
��
42 ��
Report on the session at the ‘Vredesgerechtshof ’ [Peace Court] in The Hague, 14
��
April 1942, in: DC-NIMH, Strijd Nederlands Grondgebied, box 480, file 38. Kruithof was
arrested on 21 June 1940, after which the Peace Court in The Hague sentenced him to twen-
ty years in prison. He was released on 17 April 1945 during the liberation of Leeuwarden.
Under the Netherlands Government’s Occupation Measures Decree of 17 September 1944,
the sentence had now become void. Kruithof continued his career with the armed forces.
In 1976, he appealed under the Act to Improve the Legal Status of Members of the Armed
Forces who joined the Resistance, claiming that his deed had been an act of resistance.
The request was rejected, up to the high court. See: Militair Rechtelijk Tijdschrift, LXXX-
VII (1984) 22.27. M. de Geus, “Vrederechtspraak in Nederland” in: Oorlogsdocumentatie
’40-’45. Zesde Jaarboek van het Rijksinstituut voor Oorlogsdocumentatie (Zutphen, 1995) 48-
86. G.L Coolen, “Een geval van feitelijke subordinatie”, Militair Rechtelijk Tijdschrift, XCVII
(2004) 177-184. An apologia for Kruithof is: H. Kleingeld, De dood van overste Mussert. Een
reconstructie (s.l., 2004).
43 ��
Van
��
Andel, “Gevechtsbericht van 10 t/m 14 mei 1940”.
Reconnaissance vehicle from the forward detachment of the 9th Panzer Division on
the Island of Dordrecht.
XXXIX. Armeekorps
from 13 May 1940
XXX
39
XXX
XX
XX
254
SSAH
Parachute and airborne troops listen to the latest news on the

radio of a Dutch car. Tweede Tol, 12 May 1940.
378 chapter ten
At 05.19 hrs, the Fokker T-V set off under the command of Reserve Sec-
ond Lieutenant Observer B. Swagerman, escorted by two Fokker G-Is, on
its flight to the Moerdijk bridges. Once over the Hollands Diep, Swager-
man began the attack. The first bomb exploded in the water, approximate-
ly 50 metres away from the bridge. The second attack, this time from the
south, also failed: the bomb came down right next to a bridge pillar but
did not detonate. Just to the north of Dordrecht, the Dutch planes were
intercepted by much faster Messerschmitt Me-109 fighter planes. The lat-
ter were far superior. Shot to pieces, the Fokker T-V crashed at Ridder-
kerk, killing all those on board. Only one of the G-Is returned to base.44
The German troops had struck a permanent breach in the southern
front of Fortress Holland; the road to Rotterdam was now open. In or-
der to steer the ongoing German advance in the right direction, the Air-
borne Corps, the 9th Panzer Division and SS regiment ‘Adolf Hitler’ were,
as outlined previously, merged to form a new corps: the XXXIXth, under
the command of the Generalleutnant der Panzertruppen R.F.K. Schmidt.
The mission for this corps was to push through Rotterdam into the heart
of Fortress Holland.
The battle in Rotterdam
How was the situation in the city to which the XXXIXth Corps was ad-
vancing? On 10 May, the German troops had occupied the south of Rot-
terdam and the Noordereiland. On the northern bank of the Maas, a unit
of around 50 men, led by Oberleutnant Kerfin, was holding its ground in
the Nationale Levensverzekeringsbank building. Early in the morning of
10 May, the Dutch troops stationed in Rotterdam had not been able to
drive out the German troops.
The first powerful attack after this that the Germans had to withstand
came from the Royal Netherlands Navy. The torpedo boat HNLMS Z5,
which was lying off the Hook of Holland and which was under the com-
mand of Lieutenant Commander W. van Lier, received orders in the morn-
ing of 10 May to sail up the Nieuwe Waterweg towards the Maas bridges.
At Schiedam, the motor torpedo boat TM 51, commanded by Lieutenant
J. van Staveren, joined the Z5 and they both sailed towards the heart of
the city. As they approached the Maas bridges, they opened fire on the
German positions, “whereby machine-gun nests on the Maas bridge were
wiped out”. A number of the German floatplanes were also destroyed. The
F.J. Molenaar, De luchtverdediging mei 1940 (The Hague, 1970) 152-153.

44 ��
��
German troops quickly got several heavy machine guns into position and
opened fire, wounding the helmsman on the Z5, Junior Rating K. van der
Zee, in the thigh. “I was losing a lot of blood, so the commander said:
‘Lie down, man’. I refused to leave and I kept on steering.”45 At 10.30 hrs,
the Dutch ships had to withstand an attack by German bombers. The Z5
and the TM 51 carried on firing, however, until all their ammunition was
gone. Only then did they pull back.
At 10.30 hrs, Vice Admiral J.Th. Furstner decided to send a strong navy
unit to Rotterdam. The destroyer HNLMS Van Galen and the gunboats
HNLMS Flores and HNLMS Johan Maurits van Nassau, received orders
to sail to Rotterdam “in order to prevent the Germans from crossing the
Maas, if necessary with full deployment of the ship”. The Van Galen was
the first to reach the Nieuwe Waterweg. Once she was near Vlaardingen,
the ship came under attack from the Luftwaffe. Lieutenant E.H. Larive
continued the navigation undeterred, although the bombing had caused
substantial damage. “Fire control, wheelhouse and 7.5cm gun were de-
stroyed. Everywhere on deck, everything was dislodged and damaged.
Engine room and stokehold had to be evacuated. Several of those on
board were wounded.” For the commander of the destroyer, Commander
A.S. Pinke, it was clear that he would no longer be able to reach the Maas
bridges. In the Merwede harbour, although she was already taking on wa-
ter, the Van Galen was moored neatly, whereupon she slowly sank.46 Af-
ter the sinking, the navy chiefs decided to abandon further actions on the
Nieuwe Waterweg.
This meant that the Rotterdam cantonment commander, Colonel
Scharroo, had to make do with the troops at his disposal. He did indeed
receive reinforcements of some 3,500 men, but because of the fear that
the Germans would cross the Nieuwe Maas and the rumours about the
actions of a fifth column, he ordered these soldiers to take up mainly de-
fensive positions over a wide front, which meant that he had no resources
left for a robust attack on the German positions. To make matters worse,
several nervous soldiers smashed up the whole of Rotterdam’s telephone
exchange, rendering communications between Scharroo and the Com-
mander of Fortress Holland out of action until early afternoon on 12 May.
General Winkelman decided to intervene in the Rotterdam battle zone.
On 12 May, he sent the Head of the Operations Section of General Head-
45 ��
Official
��
report by Ordinary Rating K. van der Zee, in: DC-NIMH, Strijd Neder-
46 ��
A.S.
��
Pinke, “Verslag van de handelingen van Hr.Ms. ‘Van Galen’ op 10 mei 1940”, in:
380 chapter ten
quarters, Lieutenant Colonel J.J.C.P. Wilson, to Rotterdam as his repre-

sentative. Wilson observed that the troops in the city had too little ex-
perience and were too exhausted to undertake an attack on the Willems
bridge. He therefore requested a new battalion with an energetic com-
mander. The IInd battalion of the Rifles Regiment, which was stationed in
the Hook of Holland, consequently received orders to go to Rotterdam. It
was not until 01.30 hrs on the night of 12 May, however, that the battalion
actually left—one company had to come from the island of Rozenburg—
and when it finally arrived in the city, the soldiers were extremely tired
and thus unfit for immediate deployment.
In the meantime, worrying reports about the advance of the 9th Panzer
Division had been coming in to General Headquarters. The fear was that
tanks could reach the city of Rotterdam as early as 13 May. Major General
H.F.M. baron van Voorst tot Voorst therefore ordered Colonel Scharroo to
drive the Germans from the area around the Maas bridges and to prepare
those river crossings for demolition. For this, the cantonment commander
had to call upon the troops who had already been hard at it since the first
day of the war. It was decided that two companies, one of which was made
up of personnel from the Marines Battalion led by Captain W. Schuiling,
should storm the bridge. They would be faced with German troops who
were determined to hold their ground. Oberstleutnant von Choltitz had
disregarded as many as three sets of orders to evacuate the bridgehead on
the northern bank of the Maas:
I cannot follow the order, there is too much at stake. If the bridge is blown
up, a new river crossing will have to be created and the breakthrough will
have to be won at the expense of an immeasurable number of casualties.47
After they had launched the attack, three sections of the marines group,
under the direct command of Captain Schuiling, did not get any further
than what was known as the ‘White House’. Another section, led by Ser-
geant J.C. Zimmermann, managed to reach the access road to the Wil-
lems bridge via the Boompjes. Here too, however, the fire from the Ger-
man troops who were in the Nationale Levensverzekeringsbank building,
was extremely troublesome. The marines had to retreat, leaving six men
isolated on the bridge. The assault on the Willems bridge had failed, but
what had been achieved was “that with the acquired formation of the
companies (…), the Maas bridge was kept under sufficient effective fire
D. von Choltitz, Soldat unter Soldaten (Konstanz, 1951) 65.

47 ��
��
to make any advance over the bridge impossible for the enemy.”48 The ad-
vancing German troops would not be able to seize Fortress Holland with-
48 ��
F.
��
Lugt, “Verslag gevechtshandelingen ‘Afdeeling Mariniers’ 10 t/m 14 mei 1940”, in:
382 chapter ten
out a struggle. In Rotterdam, the Dutch troops were preparing to mount a

staunch defence.
The bombing of Rotterdam
During the night of 13 May, most elements of the 9th Panzer Division, led
by Generalmajor Alfred Ritter von Hubicki, reached the south of Rotter-
dam, followed by Sepp Dietrich’s SS regiment ‘Adolf Hitler’. Generalleutnant
der Panzertruppen Schmidt, commander of the newly formed XXXIXth
Corps, arrived in Rijsoord early in the morning of 14 May and set up his
headquarters there. Schmidt was under the command of the 18th Army’s
commander, General der Artillerie G.K.F.W. von Küchler, who had given
Schmidt the following order at 17.05 hrs on 13 May: “The resistance in
Rotterdam should be broken by all means available, if necessary threaten-
ing to destroy the city and then carrying out the threat.”49 The resistance
in Rotterdam, now that victory was near, had to be broken. Chapter 5 de-
scribes how, on 13 May, von Küchler deliberated within his headquarters
and then with the commander of Army Group B, Generaloberst F. von
Bock, about the possibilities still open to the Dutch Field Army for con-
tinuing to fight and how, in relation to that and to their own objectives,
the German operations should proceed on 14 May.
In the afternoon of 13 May and the morning of 14 May, von Küch-
ler experienced the pressure from von Bock and, through him, from the
Oberkommando des Heeres, in the form of General F. Halder. The situa-
tion at Antwerp and Breda was no longer causing him concern. No crisis
had arisen there and the 18th Army now had sufficient depth to cope with
the unlikely eventuality that the French or the British should launch an
offensive there. More important was the fact that forces had to be made
available for the operations against France. At Sedan, the situation on 13
and 14 May was looking promising. It was time to assemble all mecha-
nised and motorised units for the advance after the crossing of the Meuse.
This also, therefore, included the 9th Panzer Division, which was fixed in
the Netherlands. Also, once the whole of the Netherlands had been seized,
its airfields could be used for the air war against Britain. Lastly, the Dutch
Field Army would be able to use a retreat to the New Dutch Waterline
to make troops available to reinforce the defence in Rotterdam. In short,
now that victory was within reach, time should not be lost needlessly.
49 ��
��
H.A. Jacobsen, “Der deutsche Luftangriff auf Rotterdam; Versuch einer Klärung”,
Wehrwissenschaftliche Rundschau, VIII (1958) 275.
Against this backdrop, von Küchler gave Schmidt free rein. On 13 May,
the commander of the Airborne Corps, Generalleutnant Student, had still
expected that the arrival of the 9th Panzer Division would provide enough
reinforcement to get across the Maas, but Schmidt realised the following
day that heavy artillery would also have to be brought in. Student urged,
prior to the artillery shelling, “to paralyse the strong enemy defence im-
mediately at the bridges by a short, heavy bombardment to give German
tanks the chance to cross and to leave the confined space near the bridge”.
It was the losses suffered by the German tanks in Dordrecht that had led
him to this opinion. But the aerial bombardment had to be kept to a mini-
mum. “We simply couldn’t create even more artificial roadblocks or even
block entire roads for our attacking tanks by bomb craters or rubble from
buildings.”50 Schmidt agreed with this line of thought and got in touch
with Putzier’s air corps to arrange the air support.
In the meantime, the headquarters of the Luftwaffe had also been as-
sessing the situation in the Netherlands. The Oberbefehlshaber der Luft�
waffe, Hermann Göring, was extremely concerned about the fate of Ge-
neralleutnant H.E.O. Graf von Sponeck’s 22nd Air Transportable Division.
It was also clear to Göring that the bombing of the city of Rotterdam was
vital in order to break the stalemate that had arisen there. He wanted to
use it to force a Dutch capitulation as quickly as possible. The chief of the
Operationsabteilung in the Luftwaffenführungsstab, General Otto Hoffman
von Waldau, spoke in this respect of a “radical solution”.51 Göring knew he
had the support of the Oberste Befehlshaber der Wehrmacht, Adolf Hitler,
who had let it be known from his headquarters on 14 May that the Dutch
resistance was now to be given short shrift: “Both political and military
considerations demand that this resistance be broken quickly.” The sen-
tence had come from Weisung Nr. 11.52 This was the first directive from
Hitler since the start of the campaign for the continued operations. Five
of the six points that made up the document concerned the developments
50 �Ibid, 275-276.
51 ��
Klaus
��
A. Maier, “Der operatieve Luftkrieg bis zur Luftschlacht um England” in:
Maier, e.a., Das deutsche Reich, Band 2, 340. See also the war journal of the commander
of Heeresgruppe B, Generaloberst F. von Bock, which contains Göring’s order to realise
“einen Durchbruch zur L.L. Gruppe Sponeck” [a breakthrough to airborne group Sponeck]
by means of an “Angriff eines Kampfgeschwaders mit Bombenabwurf auf die Stadt (…) ohne
Rücksicht auf die Kapitulationsverhandlungen (…)” [an attack by a wing of fighter aircraft
with a bombardment of the city (…) regardless of the negotiations about a capitulation
(…)], in: DC-NIMH, Strijd Nederlands Grondgebied, box 550, file 3.
Adolf Hitler, “Weisung Nr. 11” in: Walther Hubatsch, ed., Hitlers Weisungen für
52 ��
��
die Kriegsführung 1939-1945. Dokumente des Oberkommandos der Wehrmacht (2nd ed.;
Koblenz, 1983) 50-51.
The burning MS Statendam at the Wilhelminakade in Rotterdam.
A burnt-out truck near the Willems bridge in Rotterdam.

On the right in the foreground, a shelter.
at the point of main effort, in Army Group A. The imminent end of the
fighting in the Netherlands justified a place for this theatre of operations
in the document.
As regards the military reasoning, Hitler was referring in Weisung
Nr. 11 to the threat picture mentioned earlier that von Bock and Halder
painted for him too. A Dutch capitulation would release assets for the op-
erations against the French army and remove a threat on the right flank.
Specifying the political need for a swift end to the war in the Netherlands
was a signal to Generaloberst von Brauchitsch and his Oberkommando des
Heeres that der Führer, as a follow-up to his intervention in the formu-
lation of the operation plan for Fall Gelb, was trying to take “command
of the operations into his own hands now as well”.53 Political involvement
thus once again threatened the professional autonomy of the military
leaders and the Auftragstaktik as a principle of command. Hitler’s endeav-
ours to gain the upper hand over the military leadership were to yield re-
sults, not immediately, but later in the campaign, during the encirclement
of the allies at Dunkirk.
Various levels in the German chain of command thus wanted a bom-
bardment: Schmidt with the aim of penetrating further into Fortress Hol-
land at Rotterdam, Göring with the aim of thus putting as quick an end as
possible to the fighting in the Netherlands as a whole.
The formulation of the Weisung was coupled with skirmishes between the
53 ��
��
Oberkommando des Heeres and Hitler, the Oberste Befehlshaber der Wehrmacht. �� The con-
flict was about the command of and the missions for the armoured divisions in the point
of main effort in northern France. But something equally important, if not more so, that
was at stake in the conflict, at least for the OKH, was the guarantee of the autonomy of
the military-professional decision-making for the execution of the politico-strategic objec-
tives, as it had developed in German military history since the last decades of the nine-
teenth century. Also at stake was the preservation of the Auftragstaktik as a command prin-
ciple. The military staff was still able to secure its position at this stage. In the days that
followed, however, the combined conflict about the deployment of the armoured divisions
and the demarcation of competences grew further. Through Hitler’s Haltbefehl of 17 May
1940, it reached its climax in the Haltbefehl of 24 May. The end of the controversy meant
a significant strengthening of Hitler’s position of power in respect of the Oberkommando
des Heeres and the Oberkommando der Wehrmacht. See: W. Warlimont, Im Hauptquartier
der deutschen Wehrmacht 1939-1945. Grundlagen, Formen, Gestalten (Frankfurt am Main,
Bonn, 1964) 108-112 (quotation on 108) and the meticulous reconstruction and analysis
in K.H. Frieser, Blitzkrieg-Legende. Der Westfeldzug 1940 (Munich, 1995) 315-324 and 363-
393. For the military reasons for an end to the fighting in the Netherlands, see: Horst Boog,
“Luftwaffe Operations against the Netherlands. 10 to 15 May 1940” in: J.P.B. Jonker e.a., ed.
Vijftig jaar na de inval. Geschiedschrijving en Tweede Wereldoorlog (The Hague, 1990) 34-35
and the accompanying notes 19-21. The article also appeared as Horst Boog, “Die Opera-
tionen der Luftwaffe gegen die Niederlande vom 10. bis 15. May 1940” in: H.-M. Ottmer, H.
Ostertag, eds, Ausgewählte Operationen und ihre militärhistorischen Grundlagen (Herford,
Bonn, 1993) 347-367.
386 chapter ten
The Luftwaffe now had to designate the assets to perform the mission.
Generalmajor R. Putzier had a unit which was suitable, namely Battle
Wing 4. It consisted of three groups, all equipped with the Heinkel He-
111 twin-engine bomber. It also had a battle group equipped with the
Junkers Ju-88 (also a twin-engine bomber) and a Stuka group comprising
thirty Junkers Ju-87 dive bombers. The wing had, however, been assigned
to support the operations by the Xth Corps on 14 May against the Dutch
Grebbe Line and to attack targets at Flushing and Middelburg. It was,
therefore, not available. During the preparations for Weisung Nr. 11 on 13
May, Luftwaffe leaders had already discovered that Hitler wanted to weak-
en the air forces that were supporting the 6th Army over the north of Bel-
gium in order to make more aircraft available for the operations against
Fortress Holland. It was for that reason that the commander of Air Fleet
2, General der Flieger A. Kesselring, withdrew Battle Wing 54 from the
VIIIth Air Corps, which was supporting the 6th Army, and placed it under
the temporary command of Putzier on 14 May. Putzier then tasked Bat-
tle Wing 54, which in contrast to Battle Wing 4 only had three groups of
Heinkel He-111 bombers, with the attack on Rotterdam.54 In preparation
for this, a signals officer from the wing went to Student’s command post
in the evening of 13 May to get the Dutch positions in Rotterdam marked
on a map and to draw up the timetable for the air attack. Just before the
start on the morning of 14 May, the wing heard that negotiations had be-
gun in Rotterdam about the capitulation of the city. Kesselring, who had
had a long telephone conversation that morning with Göring about the
question of whether the bombing should go ahead or not, instructed the
wing to maintain radio contact as long as possible. The wing knew that
red flares would be fired from the Noordereiland if the bombing was not
to proceed and it was not possible to transmit the message by radio from
Germany to the aircrews.
At 11.45 hrs on 14 May, ninety Heinkel He-111 bombers from Bat-
tle Wing 54 thus set off from the airfields of Münster, Delmenhorst and
Quackenbrück in the direction of Rotterdam. Fifty-four Heinkels were
under the command of Oberst Wilhelm Lackner and 36 were under the
command of Oberstleutnant Otto Höhne. They were due to arrive over the
city of Rotterdam at 13.20 hrs.
In the meantime, negotiations had indeed got under way between the
German and Dutch commanders. They were progressing very slowly. The
first German parlementaire had handed an unsigned ultimatum to Colo-
F.J. Molenaar, De luchtverdediging in de meidagen 1940 (The Hague, 1970) 878-884.

54 ��
��
Rotterdam Cantonment 10 May 1940
Commander of Minister of
Fortress Holland Defence
Rotterdam Commander of
Cantonment Naval Assets
SSS
3 39 Engineer troops 6 3 J (-)
PERS
PERS
2
3
4
nel Scharroo, in which the Germans threatened to take steps which could
result in “the complete destruction of the city” if a response was not forth-
coming within two hours.55 It was not the first time that Scharroo had
been confronted with the consequences that the fighting would have for
the civilian population. Just the day before, at the end of the morning of
13 May, a chaplain and a civilian from the Noordereiland had appeared at
his command post. They had pointed out how the residents on the island
were suffering as a result of the artillery shelling and how the suffering
would be even greater now that the fighting was soon to become heavier.
They said they had to be back by 18.30 hrs at the latest because, they had
been told, that was when the German artillery was supposed to start shell-
ing the city. Scharroo sent them back empty-handed. He was, just as he
had been in the preceding days, optimistic about the possibilities of keep-
ing up the defence, even though little more could be expected from the
Light Division and strong German forces were on their way from Dor-
drecht. Earlier that day, Lieutenant Colonel J.J.C.P. Wilson had pointed
out that a stubborn resistance could result in the destruction of the city,
given the effects that prolonged artillery fire could have. The high com-
mand had not, however, given a definitive response to this.56
The next day, 14 May, the situation had not really changed as far as
Scharroo could see. He still saw no need whatsoever for capitulation and
55 ��
��
Demand for surrender of Rotterdam by C-XXXIX A.K. to the City Commander of
Rotterdam and the Mayor, in: DC-NIMH, Strijd Nederlands Grondgebied, box 555, file 3.
M.R.H. Calmeyer and V.E. Nierstrasz, De strijd om Rotterdam. Mei 1940 (The
56 ��
��
Hague, 1952) 154-155. J. Koolhaas Revers, Evacuaties in Nederland 1939-1940 (The Hague,
1950) 532-538.
388 chapter ten
considered the ultimatum from the German parlementaire to be of no value

at all. After consulting with General Headquarters, he decided to leave the
Germans in suspense and therefore asked the German commander for a
new proposal, this time a signed one. For this purpose, he sent Captain
J.D. Backer to the Noordereiland, who arrived there at 12.15 hrs.
Less than half an hour later, the German parlementaire had returned
to his masters with the message that the Dutch commander in Rotterdam
“was inclined to negotiate on the surrender”, whereupon General Schmidt
decided to postpone the bombing.57 At 12.00 hrs, the following radio or-
der was transmitted: “Bombardment of Rotterdam postponed because of
capitulation negotiations. Report new takeoff status.”58 But the Heinkels
were already under way and radio contact with the crews was no longer
possible. The trailing aerials had by then been wound in. Only the firing
of red flares—an emergency measure—could now stop the bombing.
In the meantime, Captain Backer had received a new ultimatum from
the Germans, signed this time, and he left at 13.20 hrs to return to Colonel
Scharroo. At that moment, dozens of German bombers were approaching
the city from the east and the south. General Schmidt was shocked at the
sight of the Heinkels: “For God’s sake, this will be a catastrophe!”, he cried
and immediately gave the order to fire the red flares. However, for the
squadron which was led by Lackner and approaching from the east, it was
too late to see the flares and they dropped their high-explosive bombs.
Oberstleutnant Höhne, on the other hand, did see the red flares at the very
last minute and his squadron, approaching from the south, aborted the
mission. Nonetheless, the effects were dramatic: 158 250kg bombs and
1,150 50kg bombs did their destructive work. The heart of Rotterdam was
almost entirely devastated.
Because of the loss of the main sources, it will never be known whose
bombardment was actually carried out: Schmidt’s ‘tactical’ bombardment,
which was in preparation for the storming of Dutch positions on the north-
ern bank of the Maas, or Göring’s ‘definitive’ bombardment, which was to
result in the Dutch capitulation. The account of the decision-making that
led to the bombing shows in any event that the two are ultimately difficult
to separate because of the multitude of commanders and authorities who
influenced the matter over the 24 hours from 13 to 14 May. What is clear is
that the destruction caused by the bombing and, even more so, the ensuing
fires throughout the city were so extensive that the bombardment no longer
Calmeyer and Nierstrasz, De strijd om Rotterdam, 199.

57 ��
��
58 ��
��
Generalkommando XXXIX.��
��
A.K., Abt.��
��
Ia, Kriegstagebuch Nr.��
��
1, in: DC-NIMH,
bore much resemblance to what Schmidt had intended. It is less apt, how-
ever, to talk about a ‘terror bombing’, as do, for example, A. Korthals Altes,
E.H. Brongers and M. Kneepkens.59 Such a label too easily equates the in-
tention with the effect. This term also assumes that the deliberate target-
ing of the inhabitants of the city was itself the objective of the bombard-
ment. This was simply not the case, neither for Schmidt nor for Göring.
Another question is how the bombing of Rotterdam relates to the law
of war applicable at the time. The points at issue were Articles 25, 26 and
27 of the Rules of Land Warfare, linked as they were to the Hague Land
War Conventions of 1907. Article 25 forbids the attack on or any form of
bombardment of undefended towns, villages, homes or buildings. On 13
and 14 May, Rotterdam was not, however, an open city, but a defended
town on the front line, where the Dutch high command had assembled
a considerable number of troops. Article 26 requires the commander of
the attacking troops, before proceeding with a bombardment, to make
every effort to inform the city authorities to that effect. On two occasions,
a German parlementaire had demanded the surrender of the city and left
no doubt as to the consequences for the civilian population if the surren-
der was not forthcoming. The two-hour period allowed to consider the
response was too short to evacuate the city. The cantonment commander,
Lieutenant Colonel Wilson, and General Headquarters had already been
aware, however, of the danger to the civilian population since the morn-
ing of 13 May but had not made any decision to take the necessary steps
in this respect.
Lastly, Article 27 states that an attacker must take all necessary steps to
spare particular buildings such as churches, hospitals, museums, monu-
ments, etc, as much as possible in the event of sieges and bombardments.
Küchler’s order to Schmidt, Göring’s intervention, stimulated as it was by
E.H. Brongers, Opmars naar Rotterdam. Deel 3. De laatste fase (Baarn, 1983) 238-
59 ��
��
241; A. Korthals Altes, Luchtgevaar. Luchtaanvallen op Nederland 1940-1945 (2nd ed.; Am-
sterdam, 1984) 47. M. Kneepkens, In het rijk van de demonen.��
Het
��
bombardement van Rot�
terdam en de normen (Rotterdam, 1993). Kneepkens reaches his conclusion by assuming
that the bombardment deliberately targeted the civilian population. He also evaluates the
bombardment against the prescribed law of war applicable after the Second World War,
particularly the Additional Protocol to the Geneva Convention of 12 August 1949 relat-
ing to the protection of victims of international armed conflicts (Protocol I), adopted in
Geneva on 8 June 1977. For a summary of the development of the humanitarian law of war
prior to that protocol, including the slow development of the written law in respect of air
bombardments and the sparing of the civilian population, see: F. Kalshoven, Zwijgt het recht
als de wapenen spreken? (The Hague, 1985), particularly 24-27 and 77 onwards. D. Fleck,
ed., The Handbook of Humanitarian Law in Armed Conflicts (Oxford, 1995) 106. G. Best,
Humanity in Warfare. The Modern History of International Law of Armed Conflicts (Lon-
don, 1980) 262-285. G. Best, War and Law since 1945 (Oxford, 1994) 49-54.
390 chapter ten
Hitler’s Weisung, and the use of ordinary instead of dive bombers are in
contravention of this article. On the other hand, however, Stukas were not
available. In addition, various measures taken indicate that the Germans
were aware of the humanitarian problems surrounding the bombardment.
Consider, for example, the marking of military targets on the map, the low
altitude (750 metres) of Lackner’s squadron, the discussion between Kes-
selring and Göring, the arrangements relating to radio contact and the use
of flares as an emergency measure; also the fact that Höhne turned away
when he saw the flares and, lastly, the decision not to use fire bombs.
But that is not all. The preamble to the Hague Convention Respecting
the Laws and Customs of War on Land states that in all cases not included
in the Regulations adopted
(…) the inhabitants and the belligerents remain under the protection and
the rule of the principles of the law of nations, as they result from the usages
established among civilized peoples, from the laws of humanity, and the dic-
tates of the public conscience.60
This clause, given the risks to the civilian population and the requirement
that there should be proportionality between the desired objective and the
means used, should have resulted in a greater degree of reticence in the
decision-making on the German side. The launch of the aircraft could, for
example, have been postponed at the news of the start of negotiations in
Rotterdam. Instead, there prevailed on 13 and 14 May the military exi-
gency and the wish for a swift end to the fighting in the Netherlands. One
should also consider that no government or leader of the air forces of the
belligerents in 1940, or in subsequent years, paid much attention to the
said clause with regard to the use of the air arm. Technology was develop-
ing at a faster pace than the humanitarian law of war. The bombardment
was not a terror bombing in the sense that the civilian population itself
60 � Convention concernant les lois et coutumes de la guerre sur terre, 18 octobre 1907,
Staatsblad van het Koninkrijk der Nederlanden 1910, No 73, page 106. The preamble is
known as the Martens Clause (originally adopted at the 1899 Hague Peace Conference and
incorporated again in the treaty of 1907). This refers to unwritten common law, such as the
principle of military necessity, the principle of humanity, the principle of distinction be-
tween combatants and civilians, the principle of proportionality and the principle of chiv-
alry or honourable conduct. One can also refer to the draft treaty known as the “Hague
Rules of Air Warfare”. It was the product of a conference held in The Hague in 1922-1923.
The draft was never formally ratified. Its more detailed stipulations cannot be regarded as
applicable law in 1940, but it is important for the assessment of the bombardment of Rot-
terdam insofar as it was a reflection of the aforementioned unwritten common law that pre-
vailed in 1940.
Meent in the afternoon

of 14 May.
was the target, nor was it a clear-cut contravention of the law of war ap-
plicable at the time.61
After the bombardment, Colonel Scharroo had no option but to capit-
ulate: the southern front of Fortress Holland had finally fallen. The Ger-
man army had suffered heavy losses in the process. In all, approximate-
ly 7,240 men had landed between Rotterdam and the Moerdijk bridges,
some 1,750 of whom had been put out of action, either killed, wounded or
taken prisoner. The exact number of dead is not known.62 On the Dutch
side, too, the losses were not insignificant. Two hundred and fifty-eight
61 ��
H.
��
Boog, “Die Operationen der Luftwaffe”, 362. T.D.
��
Biddle, “Air Power” in: ��
M.
Howard, G.J. Andreopoulos and M.R. Shulman, ed., The Laws of War.��
Constraints on War�
fare in the Western World (New Haven, London, 1994) 140-159 and in particular 150-151.
F.W. Seidler, A.M. de Zayas, eds, Kriegsverbrechen in Europa und im Nahen Osten im 20.
Jahrhundert (Hamburg, 2002) 153-154. R.-D. Müller, Der Bombenkrieg 1939-1945 (Berlin,
2004) 29-71, particularly 58-62.
��Luchtverdediging, 938-946.
62 ��
Molenaar,
392 chapter ten
troops were killed on the southern front of Fortress Holland and 185 sol-
diers died around Rotterdam.63
Conclusion
The success of the air division, which, under the command of General�
leutnant Student, seized and held the Moerdijk bridges, the bridges over
the Oude Maas at Dordrecht and those over the Nieuwe Maas in Rotter-
dam, can largely be explained by the course of the first hours of battle. The
Dutch troops stationed on the southern front of Fortress Holland were
not put on high alert on 9 May 1940 and were completely surprised by the
landing of German paratroops. Before they were able to take any counter-
measures, most had to admit defeat, while a number of tenacious soldiers
in Dordrecht showed that it was actually possible, with limited assets, to
disable a group of paratroops that had just landed.
Student’s troops had achieved their objective in a very short space of
time. In the area between Rotterdam and Moerdijk, however, the Dutch
troops did not take it lying down. They launched a counterattack, in which
even the most mobile element of the Dutch armed forces, the Light Divi-
sion, was deployed. Nonetheless, the Dutch troops failed to drive out the
Germans and to recapture the so very important Moerdijk bridges. The
reasons for this failure were twofold: firstly, the poor command process on
the Dutch side and, secondly, the tactical air support by the Luftwaffe on
the German side. In particular the extraordinarily hesitant and confusing
leadership that Colonel Van der Bijl gave to his weakened division was the
reason why the crucial bridge over the Noord at Alblasserdam was not
recaptured and why there were no targeted actions against the German
troops on the Island of Dordrecht. Instead of a targeted action against the
1st Parachute Regiment, the actions of the Light Brigade were more akin
to a mopping-up operation, as if there were all the time in the world. On
top of this was the incompetent performance of Lieutenant Colonel Mus-
sert, the cantonment commander of Dordrecht. He provided no leader-
ship whatsoever and was also regarded with deep suspicion because of his
name.
The actions of the Luftwaffe were extremely important. German aircraft
took action at the crucial moments; one only need think of the attack on
the advancing French tanks in Zevenbergschen Hoek (the assumption
Calmeyer and Nierstrasz, Zuidfront, 293-294; Calmeyer and Nierstrasz, De strijd

63 ��
��
om Rotterdam, 251.
that the allies would provide support in the event of a German attack thus
turned out to be correct). The impact that the Stukas in particular had on
the Dutch troops was enormous. The Dutch soldiers, devoid as they often
were of any anti-aircraft guns, could do nothing against the German air
attacks, which had a severely adverse effect on troop morale.
The German tanks finally dealt the decisive blow to the Dutch troops:
once parts of the 9th Panzer Division had crossed the Moerdijk bridges
and the Dutch artillery had failed to hit the bridges, the race was run. The
bombardment of the city of Rotterdam merely hastened the already inevi-
table defeat, considering the collapse of the Grebbe Line and the planned
German operations after the crossing of the Maas at Rotterdam.
The surprise airborne landings on 10 May, the serious shortcomings in
the leadership of the commander of the Light Division, the efficient tacti-
cal air support of the Luftwaffe and the arrival of the German tanks had
brought about the fall of the southern front of Fortress Holland.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
MYTH AND REALITY
Still coming to terms with the past?
Taken by surprise on 10 May 1940, the poorly prepared Dutch armed

forces managed to sustain combat for five days and to bring disarray to
German plans. Neither the deployment of elite units nor its superiority in
terms of personnel numbers or materiel enabled Nazi Germany to claim
a victory, leading to breaches of the law of war and other unfair combat
methods being necessary to bring the Netherlands to its knees, the low-
est point of which was the bombing of the undefended city of Rotterdam.
Left to their own devices by their allies, the armed forces had no choice
but to capitulate. In London, however, the Dutch government steadfastly
continued to support the resistance.
These are, in brief, the prevailing ideas which were held by the Dutch
both in and outside the occupied territory in an attempt to come to terms
with the shocking, and for some even traumatic, events of 10 to 15 May
1940. Since that time, insight into the actual sequence of events has in-
creased substantially, but specific elements from the view sketched above
have proved to be difficult to eradicate from the national psyche: reason
enough to test those theories once more.
The surprise element of the German invasion can be dealt with quickly.
Years prior to 1940, professional Dutch military literature and the gen-
eral staff already assumed that the next war would start without a formal
prior declaration of war. A wide range of measures had been taken against
the consequent risk of a strategic invasion, ranging from border security
and the construction of bunkers at strategically important bridges to an
ingenious mobilisation system. On the evening of 9 May 1940, the armed
forces had already been on a war footing for over eight months and, inso-
far as was deemed necessary, were in a state of alert. At no time previously
during the mobilisation of 1939-1940 had the commander-in-chief taken
such far-reaching measures as he did that evening. That the Netherlands
396 chapter eleven
Enemy armoured
vehicle on Dam Square
in front of the Royal
Palace in the capital
city, Amsterdam: war
becomes occupation.
expected an attack was also clear to the German troops at various loca-
tions along the border from the demolition of bridges and other objects.
Furthermore, as has been discussed in earlier chapters, there is no rea-
son to call the SS units deployed in the Netherlands elite troops; on the
contrary, their military usefulness was viewed as low by the Wehrmacht
commanders in 1940. It was only shortly before the campaign against
Poland that Hitler had created clarity on a possible war task for the SS
regiments. SS regiment ‘Der Führer’ underwent its baptism of fire at
Westervoort and the Grebbeberg. Even if parachute units can be viewed
as specially trained troops, this certainly did not apply to the airborne
troops—they were just standard infantry with a special mode of transport.
In addition, the Germans had no experience of deploying two divisions
of paratroops and airborne troops, which meant that the deployment of
these units involved greater risks than usual. The Airborne Corps was
thus not eligible to provide support for the operations tasked to Army
myth and reality 397
Group A, the main focus of Fall Gelb. In fact, the use of paratroops at Se-
dan could even have betrayed the location of the main focus to the al-
lies. Even within Army Group B, the Airborne Corps was deployed on
the sidelines, namely the Netherlands, after airborne landings at Namur
and Ghent had been rejected. Only the capture of Waalhaven airfield and
the bridges on the Moerdijk–Rotterdam axis were viewed as operation-
ally interesting by the army group. After all, it was expected to take no
more than five days to complete the capture of the Netherlands. The Ger-
man plan was to reach Moerdijk on the third day of war. Fortress Holland
would then be cut off from allied support and would not be able to hold
out for long. By deploying the airborne troops against what was viewed
as a weak opponent, the risks involved in such an operation were kept to
a minimum and the outcome was reasonably predictable. Furthermore,
the German troops in Noord-Brabant only had to focus for a few days on
reaching the paratroops at Moerdijk, Dordrecht and Rotterdam, and after
that they would regain their freedom of action.
Generaloberst von Bock was even less interested in the airborne opera-
tion against The Hague, which really needs to be viewed separately from
the advance through Noord-Brabant and the abovementioned landings.
This operation was the pet plan of Göring’s Luftwaffe and, of course, also
involved a strong political dimension: having troops nearby in case the
Netherlands, as had happened in Denmark, gave up the fight follow-
ing one day of symbolic opposition or, if that did not happen, they were
needed to attempt to take the government prisoner. Purely from a mili-
tary perspective, the success of this operation would have been a stroke of
good luck. However, when planning the other operations, Army Group B
did not take the latter option into consideration. We must also beware of
too far-reaching conclusions as if the actions of the Airborne Corps, the
9th Panzer Division and the SS units in the Netherlands point to a par-
ticular importance of the Dutch theatre of war. Within the framework of
Fall Gelb, the spectacular airborne landings at Fortress Holland and the
Belgian Fort Eben Emael had precisely the function of drawing allied
command attention away from the most important theatre of operations,
namely the Ardennes and the Meuse sector between Monthermé and Se-
dan. Paris was meant to believe for as long as possible that, as in 1914,
Germany’s point of main effort lay in Flanders, in order that the French
and British would continue to reinforce their forward front on Belgian
territory. It is also significant that during the course of the campaign
against France, in the end all ten Panzer divisions were deployed in the
point of main effort in northern France. In the theatre of operations in
398 chapter eleven
the Netherlands, however, just one Panzer division was deployed and the
weakest of the ten at that, namely the recently formed 9th Panzer Division,
which was Austrian in origin.
In this respect, some common sense needs to be applied to the inter-
pretation of the losses suffered by the Airborne Corps. These were no sur-
prise to the senior command and an elite unit was only affected to a limit-
ed degree. The most difficult personnel to replace were the captured pilots
and instructors. These losses, insofar as these were suffered during the at-
tack on The Hague, occurred in a theatre of war awarded little importance
by Army Group B when viewed within the framework of the invasion of
the Netherlands.
Finally, one should not give too much importance, with respect to sub-
sequent war operations, to the German loss of aircraft over the Nether-
lands, even if these losses were substantial. It is certainly going too far to
connect this to the cancellation of the German invasion of Britain.1 The
Luftwaffe lost chiefly transport aircraft over the Netherlands: air combat
power was not affected by this, and that was precisely what was vitally im-
portant to achieving air superiority over southern England. The sizeable
losses suffered among Luftwaffe combat aircraft did not just occur over
the Netherlands but also, and particularly, elsewhere. German air com-
bat power was later dealt further blows during the Battle of Britain, both
in terms of materiel and personnel. It is also important to remember that
Operation Seelöwe, as the plan for the invasion of Britain was known,
never got past the stage of intention and operational studies thanks to the
lack of decisiveness on the part of Hitler and a lack of interest among the
army, navy and air force. In these studies, a lack of air transport capacity
was never considered a serious issue. Ultimately, the plan was ignored in
favour of the planning of operations against the Soviet Union. It is also
worth noting that the losses over the Netherlands did not stop the Ger-
mans transporting approximately 22,000 personnel by air to Crete dur-
ing Operation Merkur exactly one year later in May 1941. It was only the
losses among aircraft and personnel during this operation that put a stop
to large-scale German airborne operations during the Second World War.
1 Horst Boog, “Die Operationen der Luftwaffe gegen die Niederlande vom 10. bis 15.
Mai 1940” in: H.-M. Ottmer, H. Ostertag, ed., Ausgewählte Operationen und ihre militär-
historischen Grundlagen (Herford, Bonn, 1993) 352. N. Fernhout, “Het verband tussen de
Luftwaffe-verliezen in mei ’40 en de Duitse invasieplannen voor Engeland”, Militaire Spec-
tator, CLXI (1992) 370-371.
The transport of French prisoners of war in Zeeuws-Vlaanderen, end of May 1940.
In violation of the humanitarian law of war, Dutch prisoners of war are forced to pull a
German gun.
400 chapter eleven
Another argument which is often used to explain the rapid Dutch defeat
concerns the German breaches of the law of war.2 These have been linked
by various authors to the National-Socialist nature of the Germans, and
it is therefore unsurprising that the Waffen SS in particular has garnered
such a poor reputation in the Netherlands. The fact that the Germans
breached the law of war in certain areas, for instance during the opera-
tions to capture the bridges over the Maas and IJssel, is not at issue, and
the same applies to the conclusion that some of the breaches were perpe-
trated by the SS (although it is impossible to say how many) and can be
ascribed to the specific nature of this section of the German armed forces.
The question is how much significance should be attached to the German
breaches of the law of war. After all, it is possible to cite examples of par-
ticularly well-maintained discipline on the German side; take the exam-
ple of the treatment of the prisoners of war at the airfields surrounding
The Hague and the outcome of the incident at the Lutterhoofdwijk Canal
involving a reconnaissance group from the 1st Cavalry Division. Further-
more, some acts by Dutch military personnel may in retrospect not pass
the strict test applied by the law of war. Out of revenge for the wound-
ing of Grenadier Damstede at Ockenburg, his colleagues denied German
parachutists the chance to surrender and shot a number of them dead.
Some of the German breaches of the law of war were a direct result of
incidents which could easily be construed as unacceptable by the Ger-
mans. At the Grebbeberg, for example, the Germans became irritated by
the fact that they were still being fired on from some Dutch positions while
other positions, right next to them, were flying white flags. It was only af-
terwards that they were able to establish that this was an unfortunate coin-
cidence and not a deliberate act. And the fact that Private Migchelbrink’s
colleagues eventually managed to escape from the outposts at the Greb-
beberg is an example of regaining combat discipline after the incident of
which Migchelbrink was the victim. The incident certainly does not prove
that ignoring the rules was accepted practice within the German army or
the SS on the western front in 1940. The German troops had been express-
ly reminded of those rules prior to the Westfeldzug in order to stop them
undertaking activities which bore no relation to the military objectives of
the operations and which could therefore harm combat power.
The breaches of the law of war were therefore no systematic symptom
in the sense that they formed part of accepted or even assigned German
2 For a detailed analysis of this issue see: H. Amersfoort, ‘Ik had mijn roode-kruis band
afgedaan’. Oorlogsrecht en gedragingen van Nederlandse en Duitse militairen in gevecht, mei
1940 (The Hague, 2005).
combat methods. They can often be viewed as incidental deviations from

the norm which, in most cases and as with the Dutch, arose spontane-
ously out of the heat of the battle. On the Dutch side, these incidents can
also be ascribed to the lack of combat experience. The instinct for survival
and other highly primary emotions such as revenge, anger and frustration
occasionally proved stronger than combat discipline. This also applied to
the Germans. In other cases, the temptation to gain combat advantage by
prohibited means won over the assignment to respect humanity. Further-
more, with regard to the SS it is possible that the reputation of the Waffen
SS gained later in the war and in a different theatre, namely the eastern
front, was later projected onto its actions in May 1940 in the Netherlands
and has thus found its way into Dutch post-war reports. The judgement
passed by the International Military Court during the Nuremberg trials
(1946-1949), which labelled the entire SS as a criminal organisation, has
of course also affected historiography.
The fact that themes such as the treacherous invasion, the supposed elite
nature of the German units, the high German losses and the breaches of
the law of war still play a part in explaining the rapid defeat of the Nether-
lands indicates that the view of the battle which prevailed during the war
can still be found in historiography. And there still appears to be a need
for that view, however contentious it may be, a need which arises from the
indignation about the harm inflicted on national identity in 1940. Specu-
lation which continues to this day on the strategic or tactical nature of
the bombing of Rotterdam can certainly only be understood in this light.
In all probability, it is a lack of familiarity with the horrors of war which
leads a section of the Dutch population to have difficulty, after all these
years, understanding why this question cannot be solved definitively
by a single historian. In this context, it can do no harm to point out yet
again that Rotterdam was not undefended; it was in fact defended on the
grounds of a carefully considered decision by the Dutch commander-in-
chief, without the evacuation of the civilian population from the expected
combat zone being considered.
It is tempting to draw the same conclusion about some impossible to
prove opinions which have succeeded in prevailing, for example the as-
sumption that Rotterdam was the first of a series of Dutch cities which
was to be bombed by the Luftwaffe. There is no concrete evidence to sug-
gest such a plan. The only firm fact is that Winkelman decided that there
was an operational link between the bombing of Rotterdam and the si-
multaneous dropping of pamphlets over Utrecht. In reality, these were
402 chapter eleven
The military
cemetery at the
Grebbeberg.
two separate events. And with respect to the names of other cities such
as The Hague and Haarlem: these are only mentioned in fairly unreliable
Dutch sources which merit being taken with a substantial pinch of salt.
The bombing of Rotterdam begs the question as to whether it can be ex-

plained as a sign of German haste in the Dutch theatre of operations. It
could form indirect proof that the Germans underestimated the opposi-
tion of which the weak Dutch army was capable in spite of everything. The
question of whether the time needed for capturing the Netherlands had
been assessed as a critical factor by the Germans cannot be answered in
the same way for all command levels and for each of the days of combat.
In the eyes of von Küchler and von Bock, 12 May was the decisive day. A
crisis had been averted at Breda and Antwerp. The 18th Army had beaten
the French 7th Army in the race to reach the cities. The original reason for
not getting behind in the intended schedule had therefore been negated.
The two subsequent days were taken up with the endgame for Fortress
Holland, but victory was already there within the Germans’ grasp.
On 13 and 14 May, the attention of the Oberkommando des Heeres was
increasingly taken up by the success of events at Sedan. The events there
were now important to the outcome of the operations in the Netherlands.
The motorised and mechanised forces—including those on Dutch soil—
would soon have to be concentrated in northern France as part of Army
Group A. Hitler’s Weisung Nr. 11 of 14 May, which foresaw this, ordered
that the opposition from the Dutch army be broken as quickly as possible.
On this point, however, the Weisung, when it was issued on 14 May, had
already almost been overtaken by events as the Netherlands had in fact
surrendered its arms in the early afternoon. The decision-making on the
bombing of Rotterdam largely took place prior to the issue of the Weisung.
The key figure in this decision-making was the commander of the 18th
Army, von Küchler. He realised that any unnecessary loss of time during
the endgame ran the risk of unexpected events. This would be the case if
either British or French units did after all enter the Dutch theatre of war.
Haste certainly played a role in Göring’s actions, as he wished to help
von Sponeck. His wishes led to an intense exchange of words by phone
with Kesselring. However, the precise part played in the decision-making
by the Oberbefehlshaber der Luftwaffe can no longer be established with
certainty due to the loss of German archives. Without wishing to detract
from the performance of the Dutch army, all that remains is to conclude
that the German invasion of the Netherlands went generally according to
expectation. These considerations do not point to an underestimation of
the opposition put up by the Dutch armed forces. The surprising element
is rather to be found on the Dutch side: the armed forces were completely
destroyed in five days, whereas a war lasting several weeks at least had
been expected.
The fact that, in spite of this, a sense of haste can be discerned in the
German orders was due, apart from the reasons already mentioned, to the
squabbling between von Bock and von Rundstedt. In Poland they had ar-
gued over which of them could claim the lion’s share of the victory, and
during preparations for Fall Gelb von Bock had had to sit back and watch
the main focus gradually being shifted from his army group to that of his
rival. During the planning and execution of the campaign against France,
von Bock thought it possible that Army Group A would grind to a halt
in the Ardennes or northern France and that his own army group would
have to force the decision and thus claim the victory for themselves. If
that happened, he would have to have sufficient numbers of troops at his
404 chapter eleven
disposal in order to reinforce his own point of main effort, which lay with
the 6th Army in Belgium, with troops which could be removed from the
18th Army after the capture of Fortress Holland. That is why it was prefera-
ble for the schedule for the Dutch theatre of operations not to be exceeded
by too much.
The Germans still encountered some unpleasant surprises, however.
Their advance towards the IJssel needed more bridge-building materials
than they had calculated, the Grebbe Line was more vigorously defended
than reconnaissance had indicated, and in Noord-Brabant it was not the
Dutch defences and the expected small capacity of the road network, but
in fact the lack of traffic coordination which slowed the advance. These
kinds of obstacles are part of military operations and they did not gener-
ally endanger the course of the German advance. This was also due to the
fact that other events had been taken into account, such as the necessity of
command measures at Breda and the failure of the attack on The Hague.
German expectations that the fate of the Netherlands, in the event that it
did not give up the fight on the first day, would be decided by the end of
the third day came true. On the evening of 12 May, the Netherlands found
itself in checkmate. The Dutch government obviously shared this opinion
in view of its departure for London on the following day.
Bearing the above in mind, the last point on which some reserve is
due is the significance of German losses. As in all armed forces, the Ger-
mans adhered to the principle that operations should be carried out with
the fewest possible losses and as such each casualty was one too many.
In retrospect, the low losses suffered by the German armed forces dur-
ing the Westfeldzug were precisely one of the surprises. In 1940, Germany
achieved a victory over France in just six weeks. In contemporary terms,
to those who had lived through the First World War, this was nothing
short of a miracle. From 1914, Germany had spent four years fighting in
vain to achieve exactly that same objective. The 1940 victory accounted
for approximately 49,000 dead and missing in action. That was a fraction
of the number of victims of the First World War.3 Even with regard to the
Netherlands, it is simply going too far to explain the German losses—
which were similar to those suffered by the Netherlands—as an unexpect-
edly high price to pay for overwhelming an underestimated opponent.
Such interpretations demonstrate once more that the view which pre-
vailed during the war is taking a long time to fade. The most apt example
of this preoccupation with the figures detailing German losses, sometimes
3 K.-H. Frieser, Blitzkrieg-Legende. Der Westfeldzug 1940 (Munich, 1995) 244, 398-400.
even going against common sense, is the fight for the IJsselmeer Dam. Al-
though it has been known for a while that the 1st Cavalry Division suf-
fered 21 fatalities between 10 and 15 May and that three Germans lost
their lives during the offensive reconnaissance of the casemates at Korn-
werderzand on 13 May, some publications persist in talking of the ‘Dam
of Death’ and perpetuating rumours originating in 1940 that losses were
suffered of up to half a battalion.
Analysing the military operations
We must therefore ignore a number of firmly entrenched theories which

are used to explain the rapid defeat of May 1940. Let us attempt to es-
tablish what the strong and weak points of the Dutch army were and, in
comparison, the German Wehrmacht. To begin with, we can say that the
Dutch system of mobilisation and concentration of the army, which was
designed in the pre-war years, worked effectively when it needed to. The
280,000 conscripts and professional soldiers reached their war destina-
tions without any particular difficulties.
Secondly, Dutch soldiers did not generally lack the will to fight once
war had broken out. When looking at a random selection of combat re-
ports gathered by the various investigative committees, there can only be
deep admiration for the soldiers who simply did what was asked of them
in difficult conditions, and often did more than that. The battles along the
river Maas, the IJssel and on the Grebbeberg, the battle against the air-
borne troops on 10 May in Fortress Holland and actions at many other lo-
cations give innumerable examples of small, close-knit groups command-
ed by inspiring officers or NCOs, who fought to the bitter end at their
modest section of the front or who successfully launched vigorous coun-
terattacks. German sources confirm the good impression that these small
groups made. It must be added, however, that such localised exemplary
conduct could not prevent the Netherlands being defeated. There lies the
tragedy of the situation for those military personnel involved, especially
when their actions proved useless in the face of premature surrender by
Dutch soldiers elsewhere in the same position.
There was also a small but well-trained, well-functioning unit at the
top of the pyramid of command, namely General Winkelman and his
General Headquarters. In the midst of what were often confusing, unex-
pected developments in the theatre of war and confronted with gradually
worsening prospects, the senior staff kept their cool and the chosen strat-
egy continued to form the leitmotif for all actions. However, as the indi-
406 chapter eleven
vidual soldier in his casemate all too soon came to realise that his brave
actions had no chance of turning the tide of the war, after just a few days
of war Winkelman too concluded that the Dutch war plan was doomed
to failure, due to factors beyond his control. Following all the disagree-
ment surrounding the war policy in the second half of the 1930s, Winkel-
man had opted for an operational plan which he thought best fitted the
limited opportunities presented by the Dutch armed forces. In this largely
static-defensive operation plan, the Field Army became even further re-
moved than it already was from its original task, namely its capability as
an instrument of mobile warfare. The army was now even more tied to
prepared lines and positions than it had been under General Reijnders.
The objective of the strategy was no more ambitious than to win time, i.e.
to continue defending Fortress Holland long enough for France, Britain
and Belgium to provide help and to halt the German advance across the
full breadth of the front. In the subsequent second phase of the battle, the
allies were to counterattack and force the German armed forces to retreat
to their own territory.
The Commander of the Field Army, Lieutenant General J.J.G. van
Voorst tot Voorst, had rejected a similar strategy in the summer of 1937 as
being too negative and too passive. After all, it offered no opportunity for
taking the initiative from the attacker. Van Voorst tot Voorst’s view was
undoubtedly correct and adheres to the principles of warfare as they were
then taught in officer training. The course of the battle did indeed put this
to the test. It demonstrated in several cases that Winkelman’s strategy did
result in hopeless battlefield situations. The conclusions about the battle
on the Grebbeberg have already detailed the psychological and tactical
disadvantage faced by a defender against an attacker with specific objec-
tives. And even the most successful Dutch defensive action, that of hold-
ing Kornwerderzand, without detracting in any way from the praise due
to Captain Boers and his men, could achieve nothing more than a con-
tinuation of the status quo. Only unfavourable developments elsewhere
could have forced the 1st Cavalry Division to move away. Yet the course of
the battle also demonstrates the correctness of Winkelman’s decisions giv-
en the circumstances. Perhaps it could be said that even Winkelman had
overestimated the skill of his troops in executing the military manoeuvres.
The battle in prepared positions generally went well for the army, judg-
ing by the battles at the Maas and IJssel, at Scherpenzeel, Kornwerderzand
and sections of the Peel-Raam Position. The two most important offen-
sives, however, namely the operation by the Light Division on and near
the Island of Dordrecht and the counterattack on the Grebbe Line on 13
May from the direction of Achterberg, did not lead to the required result.
These and other more extensive mobile operations, such as that against
the airborne troops in the area surrounding The Hague after 10 May and
the retreat from the Peel-Raam Position, exposed the weak spots in the
Dutch army. The operations appeared to call for qualities and skills which
the Dutch army did not possess sufficiently.
During small-scale battles, as we have already seen, this lack could be
compensated for by personal courage, even if such initiatives did not al-
ways turn out well as the example of Jacometti’s death on the Grebbeberg
shows. For operations of any real size, preparatory staff work, thorough
combat intelligence with which commanders can reach a realistic assess-
ment of the situation, flawless command, good communications and the
coordinated operation of individual units are the deciding factors. Too
often, however, something went wrong with one or more of these require-
ments. The morale of the fighting units also often suffered as a result of
simple things, such as the incorrect calculation of times of departure and
arrival during movements, slow loading and unloading of vehicles, the
lack of detailed maps, resulting in the unit getting lost, irregular meals and
a lack of sleep: all issues which harmed the general sense of faith in the
commanding officers and the belief that everything would turn out well
in the end. This allowed a mood to develop which can loosely be summa-
rised as ‘the organisation doesn’t work, they haven’t got things under con-
trol, this can never end well, let’s get out of here’. And this was even before
the hardest part, the battle itself, had begun. If that went badly too, it was
easy for the situation to progress from bad to worse and the commanders
ended up with virtually no control over events. This could of course have
serious consequences. At the Grebbeberg, for instance, Van Voorst tot
Voorst and Harberts did not succeed in turning their gradually increasing
numerical superiority into a decisive result. Such deficiencies relating to
the internal organisation of, the command of, and the mutual trust within
the larger units must be viewed as playing at least as important a role in
the rapid defeat as the shortage of arms and equipment which has been
so emphasised in the past–in particular when it involved the deployment
of combined arms. The German units demonstrated their superiority pre-
cisely by their operational speed, the maintenance of cohesion within op-
erations and the quality and rapidity of their command.
The consequence was that Winkelman and his most senior subordi-
nate commanders, the Commander of Fortress Holland and the Com-
mander of the Field Army, were able to take sensible countermeasures on
paper for halting the German advance, but that time after time the ex-
A place for contemplation.
On 4 May 2002, Dutch Remembrance Day, the Commander-in-Chief of the Royal

Netherlands Army, Lieutenant General M.L.M. Urlings, lays a wreath at the Grebbeberg
monument in memory of those who died in combat.
ecution came too late and the results were disappointing. Accordingly, it
seemed impossible to reverse the German victories from the first phase
of battle: the Moerdijk bridges and Waalhaven airfield remained in en-
emy hands, and the airborne units which were blocked off elsewhere in
Fortress Holland continued to occupy the Ist Corps, even though they had
not achieved their original objective. Furthermore, allied cooperation in
Noord-Brabant was particularly unfavourably influenced by the require-
ments of the pre-war policy of neutrality.
Due to this sequence of setbacks, in themselves hardly fatal, Winkel-
man’s strategy was proved dangerously weak within just a few days. As
early as during the night of 12 May, Queen Wilhelmina and her govern-
ment were informed by the commander-in-chief that the situation was
highly serious and that they should discuss whether it was worthwhile
continuing the fight. Any local successes could no longer do much to
change that general picture. Eventually, the bombing of Rotterdam and
the threat of Utrecht being subjected to the same fate led Winkelman to
conclude that further fighting was pointless.
On top of this, it would soon become clear that the Dutch army could
not permit itself to carry on with the deficiencies described above against
an opponent as strong as the German army. Of course, not everything
went smoothly for the German army either: not all their commanders
were equally vigorous, some units had no combat experience, there were
fewer vehicles than required and certain operations turned into fiascos, to
cite but a few examples. They did, however, meet the basic requirements
for success. The planning process for the Westfeldzug had initially been
difficult, but once the problems had been resolved, the operational plan
was a good one. Some of the German military leadership still retained
doubts, but Halder directed the execution of Fall Gelb with a steady hand.
The plan clearly indicated the points of main effort, detailed the direc-
tions of attack most likely to succeed, but also encompassed sufficient al-
ternatives at both macro and micro level to enable freedom of action to
be maintained and consequently allow an easy response to unexpected
developments. Army Group B could, if necessary, take over the main at-
tack from A and, again if necessary, the main focus in the Dutch theatre of
operations could be shifted from Noord-Brabant to the Veluwe area, while
the Xth Corps could choose between two axes of attack for the Grebbe Line
and, in the event that the Hollands Diep proved to be an impenetrable ob-
stacle, the XXVIth Corps could aid the assault on Zeeland and Antwerp.
The German commanders and their units were also unhindered by the
passive and negative objectives which afflicted their Dutch opponents. On
410 chapter eleven
the contrary, they were able to focus fully on realising tangible and known
objectives. When carrying out operations, they were able to rely on their
practical staff system and tried and tested rules of conduct with respect
to command, known as the Auftragstaktik, and an efficient communica-
tions system. The German commanders therefore had a better grip on the
course of their operations than their Dutch counterparts.
Within the German command system, the commander’s place was pref-
erably as close as possible to the combatant parties. There he could form
a realistic picture of the progress of the operation and his presence could
offer moral support to his troops. Further back, at the command post,
the chief of staff would keep the staff process rolling. While the German
commanders, even if they were not at their command posts, succeeded in
maintaining contact with their own staff and could continue to direct the
staff, on the Dutch side it was often the case that commanders could not be
reached for long periods of time; either because they were too far from the
front to be able to direct combat in person, or because they had gone to the
front in order to be informed of the situation at first hand.
The German units which had operated in Poland could fall back on
combat experience and, insofar as they had not come up to the mark there,
their combat power was by this time improved thanks to adapted exercise
programmes. Furthermore, in spite of the losses suffered in Poland, their
arms and materiel, at least for those units in the front line, were once more
in good shape. This naturally had a favourable effect on morale.
It is worth noting the air superiority on which the Germans could rely
in the Netherlands almost from the start of combat. This was of particular
importance for reconnaissance deep into enemy territory. For example, the
lack of activity on the North Sea and on the waterways in Zeeland quickly
indicated that there was little risk of a British landing in Zeeland followed
by an advance towards Noord-Brabant and Fortress Holland. In addition,
the always vulnerable marching columns were not subjected to air attacks,
which was particularly fortunate for the XXVIth Corps in Noord-Brabant,
plagued as it was by traffic jams. And finally, the Luftwaffe’s air superior-
ity enabled it to provide unhindered tactical support for the troops on the
ground, support which the Dutch troops had to do without and which was
sorely missed. The material damage caused by the Stuka attacks, the Luft-
waffe’s most common method, was in fact generally quite light. The effect
on the morale of the Dutch troops was much more damaging.
The sum of these factors quickly enabled the Germans to achieve a
number of local successes at the desired locations, to exploit these system-
atically and to convert them into decisive results. The speed at which this
was done meant that the Dutch commanders were frequently unaware of
the actual situation and this impeded their ability to regain the initiative.
Such examples are easy to find: the capture of the Moerdijk bridges, the
breach at Mill and the advance of the 9th Panzer Division towards Rotter-
dam. By maintaining forward movement and a high speed of attack, the
XXVIth Corps allowed the retreating Peel Division no let-up. As a result,
Colonel Schmidt had no opportunity to straighten the situation out—in
fact his command contributed to the confusion—and there soon proved to
be insufficient time available for creating a combined Franco-Dutch front.
Pre-war defence policy: does it require re-evaluation?
The Dutch and German armed forces which entered into hostilities in
May 1940 were both the product of the policies pursued in the two re-
spective countries, and specifically those pursued since the end of the
First World War. As we saw earlier, they would therefore differ on deci-
sive factors at the outbreak of the Second World War. It is noticeable that
the basic principles adhered to in the 1920s did show certain similarities.
Both countries reorganised their armies and reduced them in size: Ger-
many was forced to do so by the Treaty of Versailles, while the Nether-
lands did so on the basis of budgetary priorities, profiting from decreasing
international tensions.
When Hitler, having thrown off the restrictions imposed by Versailles,
gave the signal for German rearmament, many serious difficulties were
encountered. The pool of officers and NCOs was too small and there was
a serious lack of trained men due to the many years in which conscription
had been prohibited. As a result, they had to rely more heavily than they
would have liked on the First World War veterans, who were experienced
but no longer young. Furthermore, the massive losses from that war were
still affecting the age demographics of the German population. Added to
this was a long period in which there were severe shortages of arms and
equipment, and ammunition supplies would quickly be exhausted if a war
was not concluded within several weeks or at the most a few months. In-
sofar as these problems related to personnel and training, they could be
solved prior to 1938, when the strength and size of the Wehrmacht had
not yet grown that dramatically. This was largely due to the fact that on
creating the Reichswehr it had been decided that this would form the core,
out of which in due course a large and modern army could rise, as befit-
ting Germany’s ambitions to be a major power. In the Reichswehr, the pro-
412 chapter eleven
fessional expertise, experience and traditions of the old army were pre-
served and further developed in anticipation of this new army.
In the 1930s, the Netherlands struggled to overcome difficulties which
were very similar to those experienced by Germany: insufficient numbers
of officers and NCOs, insufficient numbers of trained men, reservists who
were too old and not sufficiently trained. The army formation system de-
signed in 1922 was, however, not suited to remedying these issues; in fact
they were largely caused by the system itself and the manner in which it
was implemented. In around 1935, when the need for stronger national
defences was recognised, there was virtually no coherent basis for rebuild-
ing the forces within the contemporary organisation, never mind the fact
that by that point Germany already had the advantage in terms of time.
On the international arms market, too, the best opportunities had already
passed the Netherlands by. After 1938, the German military advantage
only increased, and not just compared to the Netherlands. With respect
to military combat power ratios in Europe, time was on Germany’s side
at the end of the 1930s. While the Third Reich had its fast-growing army
and air force gain operational experience in Austria, Czechoslovakia and
Poland and work hard to build up materiel supplies, the Western allies
would only be able to breach the gap in rearmament in the longer term.4
In the meantime, the Netherlands continued its preparations by build-
ing casemates, improving border control, forming the first combat-ready
units since 1922 and proclaiming the Extraordinary Call-up for External
Security (BOUV) at the end of September 1938. It was only the general
mobilisation at the end of August 1939 which called up the entire army.
Until the early spring of 1940, however, its chief pastime was construct-
ing positions rather than firearm training, conducting manoeuvres for the
larger units or combat exercises.
L. de Jong has summarised the Dutch post-First World War defence is-
sues in the succinct comment that the war of May 1940 had in fact already
been lost by the cutbacks of the 1920s and 1930s. If this is taken to mean,
as described above, that the 1922 system was largely responsible for the
later shortcomings in national defence, then there is little point in argu-
ing against this. It is, however, a judgement in retrospect which ignores
the question of whether any other armed forces policy could have been
pursued during the 1920s and 1930s, any policy which could have allowed
the Netherlands to enter into the May 1940 war under more favourable
circumstances.
4 Idem, 24-30.
When looking at the background behind the creation of the 1922 army
system, it is impossible to avoid the conclusion that, as R.P.F. Bijkerk has
argued, there was no satisfactory solution to the problem of the defence of
the Netherlands after 1918.5 The pre-war cohesion between the policy of
armed neutrality, the structure of the army, the conscription system and
the contribution of the fortifications and the Field Army to national de-
fences could not be fully restored. The increase in scale which the conduct
of war had undergone during the First World War, the first proper total
war, raised the fundamental question of whether a country as small as the
Netherlands was capable of mobilising armed forces which in peacetime
could act independently as a credible deterrent. There was also the ques-
tion of whether the Netherlands could be a valid partner within a group
of allies in any large-scale conflict, an alliance which would by definition
be of an ad hoc nature.
The Netherlands had long struggled with the question of how powerful
the armed forces, and in particular the army, ought to be and which tasks
they should be able to undertake in order to be able to maintain national
neutrality—which after all formed the mainstay of the national defence
policy. This issue had influenced political decision-making on national
defence almost continuously since 1840. Any pleas for a powerful de-
fence mechanism were always rebuffed with the argument that, as a minor
military power, the Netherlands would never have the ability to defend
itself alone. The strategy recognised this by relying on support from al-
lies. Dutch national defence would therefore never have to, and never be
able to, provide a real guarantee of security. This fact, which was irrev-
ocably linked to the Netherlands’ position as a minor power, has always
played into the hands of opponents of a strong national defence. If the
First World War served as an example of future warfare—and it is logical to
view it as such—then the always difficult issue of what comprises sufficient
national defence becomes impossible to solve in practice. In light of this,
the mentality of ‘the broken rifle’ which was formerly the most common
explanation (and reproach!) for the defeat of 1940 becomes an untenable
simplification of reality.
There was certainly no political or social support during the 1920s for
the high cost of the armed forces which could guarantee the Netherlands’
independence and prevent annexation by a foreign power. The govern-
ment was cutting back and there was no foreign threat to justify a high
5 R.P.F. Bijkerk, “W.F. Pop (1858-1931)” in: G. Teitler and W. Klinkert, eds, Kopstukken
uit de krijgsmacht. Nederlandse vlag- en opperofficieren 1815-1955 (Amsterdam, 1997) 297-
298.
414 chapter eleven
defence budget. Furthermore, a familiar principle of the national defence

policy, namely the European balance of power, had ceased to exist. No
convincing argument had replaced it. Becoming an ally of France was not
an option. This would have conflicted with the Dutch policy of aloofness
and neutrality. In addition, the Dutch government mistrusted France’s
power politics with respect to Germany. Giving up its neutrality and forg-
ing an alliance with France and Britain would also probably have had little
effect. The predicted result, i.e. allied support, could also be obtained by
maintaining neutrality–at least that was the prevailing strategic thinking.
With or without the maintenance of neutrality, in the event of a German
assault the fate of the Netherlands would be sealed by the resulting power
clash between Germany and the Western allies. The result of this clash is,
of course, now all too familiar.
On top of this, the experiences of Czechoslovakia and Poland did not
encourage the Netherlands to give up its tried and tested policy, while any
change would turn the risk of becoming involved in a future war into a
certainty. Even Belgium, which in view of the First World War had few
illusions about its fate in the event of a subsequent round of the Franco-
German battle for power, went no further than holding secret talks with
Paris. The formation of a separate group of allies comprising the small Eu-
ropean states with the aim of protecting themselves against German ex-
pansion plans was just as unreliable and unattractive. This kind of alliance
could have been forged out of what were known as the Oslo states, the
politico-economic partnership between the Scandinavian countries and
the post-war Benelux states.6
What could the Netherlands expect from the League of Nations? That
organisation was at best a promise for the future, but at the time it was
no practical alternative to a national defence policy. Faith in the system
of collective security, as embodied by the League of Nations, became less
and less of a consideration as the 1930s neared their close; the Netherlands
had never been an enthusiastic participant in the system anyway.7 And
what about timely, powerful rearmament while maintaining the neutrality
policy? In this case, too, little would probably have been gained. It is true
that Winkelman would then not have been forced to opt for a strategic-
defensive strategy. At best, however, the war would simply have lasted
longer than five days. The Netherlands would have been spared the national
6 See G. van Roon, Kleine landen in crisistijd. Van Oslostaten tot Benelux 1930-1940
(Amsterdam and Brussels, 1985).
7 R. van Diepen, Voor Volkenbond en vrede. Nederland en het streven naar een nieuwe
wereldorde 1919-1946 (Amsterdam, 1999) 292-293.
trauma of rapid defeat, but would that have been worth the higher cost to
society, prior to the war, and the higher losses and greater damage during it?
A final problem was that the various requirements which the new army
system needed to meet were difficult to reconcile with each other. It
proved impossible to design a system which in peacetime was cheap and
demanded only small-scale conscription of the population and yet pro-
vided a large, well-trained and well-equipped army in the event of mo-
bilisation. The 1922 system was therefore a compromise with inherent
shortcomings, which was further weakened by later cutbacks. The major
difficulties were the lack of training among conscripts, the lack of expe-
rience among commanders when it came to the bigger picture, and the
separation of the peacetime and wartime organisations. In addition, there
was little financial room for manoeuvre for investing in modernising arms
and equipping the army. Within the restrictions imposed by the 1920s,
the system thus affected the future in a way that was unavoidable and at
the same time acceptable.
It is therefore incorrect to view the pursued policy as the political lead-
ership’s underestimation of the German threat and as an insufficient grasp
of the requirements of modern warfare among the military leadership.
The requirements made of this policy and of the army system were simply
too contradictory to lead to a satisfactory result in both the short and the
long term. In the short term, the foreign threat was small, in the long term
it was possible that a severe military threat would again arise.
In this respect, we should not confine ourselves to simply comparing
rapid German rearmament and Dutch rearmament, which is often viewed
as too late and too slow. In fact, the German Reich is the exception here
and not the Netherlands. Other great powers such as France and Britain
also lagged behind Germany when it came to arms. It was more fitting
for a minor power such as the Netherlands to follow the example of these
countries rather than to outdo them. It is difficult to say how Dutch de-
fence policy compares to other minor powers such as Denmark or Bel-
gium due to the lack of comparable studies, but the general impression is
that the Netherlands did not deviate that much from those two countries.
The fact that Belgium did not capitulate after five days as the Netherlands
had but continued the fight for eighteen days is not just due to the power
of the Belgian armed forces–the Belgian army was more than twice the
size of the Dutch army–but also to the assignment issued to Army Group
B. Its task was to advance at a steady pace, drawing the bulk of the British
and French armies towards it so that, once Army Group A had reached
416 chapter eleven
the coast, those forces could be destroyed on Belgian territory. Until that
time, Belgium was defended not only by its own armed forces, but also by
those of France and Britain.
The above leads us to the conclusion that the Netherlands really had no
viable alternative for its pursued security policy in the 1920s and 1930s. It
explains why the responsible politicians were not willing to depart from
the policy of neutrality and the related policy of military deterrence, even
if the policy pursued and the chosen army system were not completely
satisfactory. The policy did, after all, have a long history and in view of
the outcome of various international crises—1870 and 1914-1918 for in-
stance—it was a successful one.
It could be added that it is doubtful whether an alternative Dutch na-
tional policy would have had any influence on the German or French po-
litical or military decision-making with respect to the Netherlands prior
to the outbreak of the conflict. If anything stands out in this decision-
making, it is the indifference to the power of the Dutch defence mech-
anism and the value of Dutch neutrality. Both France and Germany al-
lowed themselves only to be influenced by their own interests, as was the
case in the Netherlands. Hitler’s main focus was the destruction of France.
After the Polish campaign he ordered plans to be drawn up for this pur-
pose. The German staffs included the occupation of the Netherlands in
their plans purely out of military-operational considerations, namely to
prevent the British forming a bridgehead on the continent within Fortress
Holland. The attack on the Netherlands later came to depend on whether
the German armed forces felt powerful enough to attack France, as Hitler
wanted. The breach of the Dutch neutrality policy was not viewed as an
insurmountable obstacle by either the military or Hitler.
France’s main aim was to repel a German attack. To this end it would
defend itself on a forward front in Belgium. Again for military-operation-
al reasons, this front was to link up in the north with the main Dutch de-
fence, i.e. Fortress Holland. If this was not included in the plans, the al-
lied front could be outflanked via Noord-Brabant and France would be
exposed to danger. Paris therefore accepted the Netherlands as an ally
prior to the battle and promised substantial military support. One of the
major objectives of the Dutch neutrality policy had thus been achieved,
but without the Dutch defence mechanism having to contribute much in
the way of combat power. The Dutch operation plan for Noord-Brabant,
which was not particularly favourable for Gamelin, did not prevent him
offering support. Extending the front northwards into Dutch territory was
gradually becoming dogma in Paris.
The authors of this book hope that their arguments make it clear that the
rapid defeat of the Netherlands can no longer be explained by the picture
which originated during the war. Not all aspects of this picture were factu-
ally incorrect: the Germans enjoyed superior firepower, the Netherlands
had no tanks, Dutch conscripts lacked combat experience and the Nether-
lands had started its rearmament too late. Yet it is incorrect to suggest that
the five dark years of occupation could have been prevented by the alloca-
tion of a higher defence budget from 1922 onwards or if the Germans had
not employed all kinds of illegal methods and ploys.
The new picture that has gradually been forming as 1940 recedes into
history is more prosaic and less exceptional than the old picture. It cer-
tainly does not have the same epic eloquence, but it reflects better the his-
torical reality of how the German forces conquered the Netherlands.
ANNOTATED BIBLIOGRAPHY
General
A large amount of literature has been published about the war in May
1940. The most important books and journal articles to have been pub-
lished before 1980 are listed in: P.J.A. Korver, “Voorlopig bibliografisch
overzicht van de meidagen 1940”, Mededelingen van de Sectie Militaire Ge-
schiedenis Landmachtstaf, III (1980) 55-75. For a bibliographical survey of
works published after 1980, please refer to the annual publication by the
Netherlands Institute of History in The Hague: Repertorium van boeken en
tijdschriftartikelen betreffende de geschiedenis van Nederland.��
This publica-
tion appeared in print until 1995. The more recent volumes are available
in digital format; see www.dbng.nl. Another useful reference is Terugblik
’40-’45. Maandblad van de Documentatiegroep ’40-’45.
The chief source of information on Dutch army operations in May 1940

is the collection of combat reports and reports concerning the battle on
Dutch territory.��
This
��
is held by the Netherlands Institute of Military His-
tory (NIMH) in The Hague, the institute which, following several name
changes, is the direct descendant of the Krijgsgeschiedkundig Instituut
[War History Institute]. The collection is also held in the Central Archive
Depot of the Netherlands Ministry of Defence. German archives about
the battle during May 1940 are held in the Bundesarchiv-Militärarchiv
in Freiburg im Breisgau. Copies of some of these documents are held at
the Netherlands Institute for Military History. Another primary source,
which should be used with discernment, however, is: Enquêtecommissie
Regeringsbeleid 1940-1945. ��
Verslag houdende de uitkomsten van het onder-
zoek. Deel 1a, b en c. Algemene inleiding/Militair beleid 1939-1940 (The
Hague, 1949).
The first survey of military operations, as viewed almost exclusively
from the Dutch side, is the document published by the ‘Ons Leger’ as-
sociation [F.A.J. de Klerck], Beknopt overzicht van de krijgsverrichtingen
422 annotated bibliography
der Koninklijke Landmacht 10-19 mei 1940, in opdracht van den Minister
van Oorlog samengesteld bij de Sectie Krijgsgeschiedenis van de Generalen
Staf (Leiden, 1947).��
Highly
��
detailed descriptions of the combat were pub-
lished by the General Staff ’s War History Department from 1951 onwards
in the series De strijd op Nederlands grondgebied tijdens de Wereldoorlog
II. The sections on the ground battle, in which V.E. Nierstrasz’s influence
was particularly obvious, were published in The Hague between 1951 and
1963. Initial studies had already been published in the journal De Mili-
taire Spectator from 1940-1942 and post 1945.
For the general readership, J.J.C.P. Wilson used this series as the basis
for his publication Vijf oorlogsdagen en hun twintigjarige voorgeschiedenis
(Assen, 1960). Another popular, slim volume from the same year is: D.H.
Couvée, De meidagen van ’40 (The Hague, 1960). E.H. Brongers published
his first book about May 1940 in 1963, the concise De oorlog in mei ’40
(Utrecht and Antwerp, 1963). For the German market there is the rather
unsatisfactory F.S.A. Beekman and F. Kurowski, Der Kampf um die Fes-
tung Holland (Herford, 1981). One photographic book is: H. Bredewold
and J. Zwaan, 1940–De mei-oorlog. De Duitse pinksterveldtocht tegen Ne-
derland in beeld (Amsterdam and Alphen aan den Rijn, 1975). A survey of
some of the light troops is given by J.A. Bom in De Regimenten Huzaren-
Motorrijders 1938-1940 (Amersfoort, 2000). For information about the
cavalry, see E.H. Brongers, De Nederlandse cavalerie in de meidagen van
1940 (Amersfoort, 1998).
Those who wish to immerse themselves in the history of the Sec-
ond World War cannot of course ignore L. de Jong’s magnum opus Het
Koninkrijk der Nederlanden in de Tweede Wereldoorlog (13 volumes; The
Hague 1969-1989), of which Deel 3. Mei ’40 (The Hague, 1970) deals with
the German invasion of the Netherlands.��
��
De Jong’s books have been pub-
lished in both an academic and a popular edition. This book only refers to
the academic edition. The response to the completed works can be found
in part 14 Reacties (2 volumes; The Hague, 1991).
With respect to the Royal Netherlands Navy in the Second World War,
the following are important: K.W.L. Bezemer, Zij vochten op de zeven
zeeën. Verrichtingen en avonturen der Koninklijke Marine in de Tweede
Wereldoorlog (Zeist, 1964), A.N. baron de Vos van Steenwijk, Het marine-
beleid in de Tweede Wereldoorlog (Amsterdam and Dieren, 1986), and
Ph.M. Bosscher, De Koninklijke Marine in de Tweede Wereldoorlog (3 vol-
umes; Franeker, 1984-1990). By far the most important book concerning
the air force is: F.J. Molenaar, De luchtverdediging mei 1940 (The Hague,
1970). The following popular works can also be consulted with respect to
annotated bibliography 423
the air force: W. Schoenmakers and F. Postma, Mei 1940. De verdediging

van het Nederlandse luchtruim (Amsterdam and Dieren, 1985), and Johan
P. Nater, 10 mei 1940. Luchtoorlog boven Nederland (Rotterdam, 1982).
The military personnel who were decorated with the Military Order of
William, the highest award for bravery in the Netherlands, for their ac-
tions during May 1940 are listed in: P.G.H. Maalderink, ed., De Militaire
Willems-Orde sedert 1940 (S.l., 1982). This book contains a survey of the
military operations in which the Dutch armed forces have been involved
since May 1940, the service records of the Knights of the Military Order
of William and the Royal Decrees which determined who received this
decoration.
For a survey of the casemates, please refer to H.R. Visser and J.S. van
Wieringen, Kazematten in het Interbellum (Utrecht, 2002), under the edi-
torship of T. de Kruijf. P.J.M. Kamps wrote a useful, quantitative reference
work, Geschut en mitrailleurs van Koninklijke Landmacht en Koninklijke
Marine op 10 mei 1940 (S.l., 1996), including a brief introduction to the
typology and provenance of the weapons. Also highly recommended is
G. de Vries and B.J. Martens, Nederlandse vuurwapens 1895-1940. Land-
macht en Luchtvaartafdeling (Amsterdam, 1993).
E.H. Brongers drew up a useful survey of the German order of battle:
E.H. Brongers, “Slagorde Duitse strijdkrachten bij de aanval op Neder-
land in Mei 1940” (NIMH collection). For an overview of German and
allied aircraft losses in the Netherlands during the Second World War,
see Crashregister: www.nimh.nl. He also wrote about German personnel
losses in: “Gesneuvelde Duitse militairen in Nederland mei 1940”, Mars et
Historia, XXXII (1998) 46-49.
For a survey of the French order of battle in 1940, please refer to: Lee
Sharp. The French Army 1939-1940. Organisation: Order of Battle: Opera-
tional History (London, 2001) and Guerre 1939-1945. Les Grandes Unités
Francaises (Paris, 1967).
Chapter One
An idea of the rapid defeat during and just after the war can be gained
from: E.N. van Kleffens, The rape of the Netherlands (London, 1940). See
also: P.L.G. Doorman, Military operations in the Netherlands 10th-17th
May 1940 (London, 1944); L. de Jong, Je maintiendrai (3 volumes; Lon-
don, 1941-1944); G. Kraemer and G. Ballintijn, De meidagen van 1940.
Op oorlogsreportage in Nederland (Enschede, 1945); J. Visser, Vijf dagen
oorlog in Nederland. 10-14 mei 1940 (The Hague, 1946), and: W.A. Poort
and Th.N.J. Hoogvliet, Slagschaduwen over Nederland. De geschiedenis

van de oorlog van 10 tot en met 28 mei 1940 op Nederlands grondgebied
(Haarlem, 1946). Another illustrative example is the lecture given by G.J.
Sas, the former Dutch military attaché in Berlin, on 5 March 1941 in New
York, entitled: “De Duitsche invasie in Nederland” (NIMH collection, box
557, file 6). Also: G.H. Hoek, Doodenwacht bij onze gevallenen (Wagenin-
gen, 1945); O. Ebbens and E. Wijga, Dodendam.��
��
De strijd voor en op de Af-
sluitdijk in de Meidagen van 1940 (Amsterdam, 1946), and: B. Honselaar,
De zwarte duivels van Rotterdam (Rotterdam, 1948).
An important review of the first three volumes of L. de Jong, Het
Koninkrijk der Nederlanden in de Tweede Wereldoorlog, is: I. Schöffer,
“Het trauma van de Nederlandse nederlaag”, Tijdschrift voor Geschiede-
nis, LXXXIV (1971) 536-551, in which the section on May 1940 is highly
praised. The importance of the Rijksinstituut voor Oorlogsdocumentatie,
now the Netherlands Institute for War Documentation, in recording the
history of the 1940-1945 period is described in, for example: M. Pam, De
onderzoekers van de oorlog: het Rijksinstituut voor Oorlogsdocumentatie en
het werk van dr. L. de Jong (The Hague, 1989) and in: A.H. Paape, “Veer-
tig jaar Rijksinstituut voor Oorlogsdocumentatie” in: D. Barnouw, M.
de Keizer and G. van der Stroom, eds, 1940-1945: Onverwerkt Verleden?
(Utrecht, 1985). See also: L. de Jong, “Ontstaan en achtergronden van
mijn werk” in: G. Abma, Y. Kuiper and J. Rypkema, eds, Tussen goed en
fout. Nieuwe gezichtspunten in de geschiedschrijving 1940-1945 (Franeker,
1986) 19-29, and: L. de Jong, “The historiography of the Netherlands in
the Second World War” in: A.C. Duke and C.A. Tamse, eds, Clio’s mir-
ror. Historiography in Britain and The Netherlands (Zutphen, 1985) 215-
228. For the development of military historiography in the Netherlands,
including that of May 1940, see B. Schoenmaker, “Clio at arms: military
history in the Netherlands”, Mededelingen van de Sectie Militaire Geschie-
denis, XIV (1991) 82-104. E.H. Brongers has published several books on
May 1940 since 1963. The author refutes the sometimes harsh assessments
of the Dutch army given by Nierstrasz and De Jong. The titles include, in
addition to the abovementioned De oorlog in mei ’40, the following: De
slag om de residentie 1940 (Baarn, 1968), Grebbelinie 1940 (Baarn, 1971),
Een dag oorlog in Zuid-Limburg (Baarn, 1973), Afsluitdijk 1940 (Baarn,
1977), and: Opmars naar Rotterdam (3 volumes; Baarn, 1982-1983). Some
of these titles are still in print. Another illustration of Brongers’ views
is: E.H. Brongers, “Kritiek op dr. L. de Jong’s ‘Mei ’40’”, Ons Leger, LIV-
8 (1970) 1-4, with the subsequent response from De Jong: “Repliek van
prof. De Jong op majoor Brongers’ kritiek”, Ons Leger, LIV-10 (1970) 1-2.
Good descriptions of firsthand experiences include: H. van Heerde,

Tusschen vuur en ijzer (Meppel, 1940) on the IInd battalion of the 19th In-
fantry Regiment, and: E.P. Weber, De vuurproef van het Grensbataljon.
Belevenissen van het Ie Bataljon 26e Regiment Infanterie tijdens den Neder-
landsch-Duitschen oorlog van 10-15 mei 1940 (Arnhem, 1945).
The first edition of the Dutch edition of the present book led to criti-
cism from W.D. Jagtenberg, a Grebbeberg veteran, in his pamphlet Ge-
schiedvervalsing over de meidagen van 1940. Kiest Defensie vóór de SS en
tégen haar veteranen? (Wijchen, 1995). A second, revised edition appeared
as Ik beschuldig. Vijftien jaar strijd tegen het Ministerie van Defensie over
haar boek Mei 1940. De strijd op Nederlands grondgebied (Soesterberg,
2010). He objected in particular to the conclusion drawn in Mei 1940 re-
garding German and Dutch breaches of the law of war in the Dutch thea-
tre of operations. In 2000, Jagtenberg took legal action against the State
of the Netherlands regarding this matter, but lost the case. The issue of
breaches of the law of war on Dutch territory in May 1940 is analysed in
detail in H. Amersfoort, ‘Ik had mijn roode-kruis band afgedaan’.��
��
Oorlog-
srecht en gedragingen van Nederlandse en Duitse militairen in gevecht, mei
1940 (The Hague, 2005). For a survey of legal proceedings with respect
to academic research, see A. de Baets, Censorship of historical thought. A
world guide 1945-2000 (London, 2002).
Chapter Two
Major recent studies of the First World War include the compact and in-
telligent The First World War (Oxford, 2002), by the well-known British
military historian Michael Howard, and the weighty trilogy (forthcom-
ing): H. Strachan, The First World War (Oxford, 2001-), of which the first
volume, To Arms, was published in 2001. The role of Ludendorff in the
creation of the Weimar Republic is described in: Martin Kitchen, The si-
lent dictatorship.��
��
The politics of the German High Command under Hin-
denburg and Ludendorff, 1916-1918 (London, 1976). The views of Hitler
on the German defeat and the fall of the empire can of course be found in
Mein Kampf, first published in Munich in 1925.
There are two general works on the history of the Weimar Republic
which are still worth consulting: firstly Eberhard Kolb, Die Weimarer Re-
publik (Munich and Vienna, 1984) and also: Horst Müller, Weimar. Die
unvollendete Demokratie (Munich, 1987). The most important book on
fascism is: E. Nolte, Der Faschismus in seiner Epoche (Munich, 1971). The
rise of National-Socialism in Germany and the seizure of power by the Na-
zis is dealt with in: Martin Broszat, Die Machtergreifung. Der Aufstieg der
NSDAP und die Zerstörung der Weimarer Republik (Munich, 1984); Wolf-
gang Michalka, ed., Die nationalsozialistische Machtergreifung (Paderborn
etc., 1984), and: Peter D. Stachura, ed., The Nazi Machtergreifung (London,
1983). A survey of the history of Hitler’s Third Reich can be found in: Klaus
Hildebrand, Das Dritte Reich (Munich, Berlin and Vienna, 1980).
For a concise history of international relations in the interwar period,
please refer to: G.M. Gathorne-Hardy, A short history of international af-
fairs, 1920-1939 (4th edition, 2nd impression; London, New York and To-
ronto, 1952). The Weimar Republic’s foreign policy is described in: Peter
Krüger, Versailles. Deutsche Aussenpolitik zwischen Revisionismus und
Friedenssicherung (Munich, 1987). Hitler’s foreign policy is described in:
Klaus Hildebrand, Deutsche Aussenpolitik 1933-1945. Kalkül oder Dogma?
(6th impression, Stuttgart, Berlin and Cologne, 1980). British defence
policy is described succinctly by the abovementioned Michael Howard in:
The continental commitment. The dilemma of British defence policy in the
era of the two world wars (Harmondsworth, 1972). A more extensive look
at the policy can be found in: Brian Bond, British military policy between
the two world wars (Oxford, 1980).
The content of the meeting on 7 November 1937 was laid down in a
memorandum by Hitler’s aide-de-camp Oberst F. Hossbach. This Hoss-
bach memorandum, as it is known, has been published in, among other
documents: Der Prozeß gegen die Hauptkriegsverbrecher vor dem Interna-
tionalen Militärgerichtshof Nürnberg 14. November 1945-1. Oktober 1946
(Nuremberg, 1947), vol. XXV, 402-413. The value of this document has
had serious doubts cast on it by A.J.P. Taylor in his polemic The origins of
the second world war (London, 1961 and later impressions), a book which
is still certainly worth reading. Those who do not agree with Taylor can
turn to: Walther Hofer, “‘Entfesselung’ oder ‘Ausbruch’ des Zweiten Welt-
krieges?” in: Gottfried Niedhart, ed., Kriegsbeginn 1939. Entfesselung oder
Ausbruch des Zweiten Weltkriegs? (Darmstadt, 1976). The relationship
between the German army and the Nazis is dealt with in: Klaus-Jürgen
Müller, The army, politics and society in Germany 1933-45. Studies in the
army’s relation to Nazism (Manchester, 1987). There is also an interesting
article by Gerd R. Ueberschär, “General Halder and the Resistance to Hit-
ler in the German High Command 1938-1940”, European History Quar-
terly, XVIII (1988) 321-347.
The British policy of appeasement and French foreign policy are looked
at in, respectively: Maurice Cowling, The impact of Hitler: British Politics
and British Policy, 1933-1940 (Cambridge, 1975), and: Geoffrey Warner,
Pierre Laval and the eclipse of France (New York, 1968). British and French
military preparations for the war are described in: Brian Bond, France
and Belgium 1939-1940 (London, 1975), and: M. Gamelin, Servir (3 vol-
umes; Paris, 1946). With respect to the French operations in the Dutch
provinces of Noord-Brabant and Zeeland, V.E. Nierstrasz wrote: “De
Franse en Belgische operatieplannen van 1939 en 1940 in verband met
de Nederlandse verdediging van de zuidelijke provinciën en de opmars
van het Franse VIIe Leger naar Noord-Brabant en Zeeland in mei 1940”,
Orgaan van de Vereniging ter beoefening van de Krijgswetenschappen, IV
(1949-1950) 113-182. A very detailed description of this is also given in B.
Chaix, En Mai 1940, Fallait-il entrer en Belgique? Décisions stratégiques et
plans opérationnels de la campagne de France (Paris, 2000).
Chapter Three
An excellent introduction to the historiography of the Netherlands since

1900 is given by: P. Luykx and N. Bootsma, eds, De laatste tijd.��
��
Geschied-
schrijving over Nederland in de twintigste eeuw (Utrecht, 1987).��
The
��
his-
toriography of the Netherlands during the First World War is starting to
take shape, witness P. Moeyes, Buiten schot. Nederland tijdens de Eerste
Wereldoorlog 1914-1918 (Amsterdam, Antwerp, 2001); H.P. van Tuyll van
Serooskerken, The Netherlands and World War I. Espionage, diplomacy
and survival (Leiden, 2001); A. Staarman, Verre van vredig. Nederland
tijdens de Eerste Wereldoorlog 1914-1918 (Delft, 2004) and: M.M. Abben-
huis, The Art of Staying Neutral. The Netherlands in the First World War,
1914-1918 (Amsterdam, 2006).
A general survey of the history of the Netherlands during the in-
terwar period can be found in the first two volumes of L. de Jong’s Het
Koninkrijk der Nederlanden in de Tweede Wereldoorlog, respectively: Voor-
spel (The Hague, 1969) and Neutraal (The Hague, 1969). More concise are
the articles in volume fourteen of Algemene Geschiedenis der Nederlanden
(Haarlem, 1979): Joh. de Vries, “Het economisch leven in Nederland”,
102-145; J. Bosmans, “Het maatschappelijk-politieke leven in Nederland
1918-1940”, 200-254, and: A.F. Manning, “Nederland en het buitenland
1918-1940”, 336-364. ��
A socio-economic history of the Netherlands dur-
ing the occupation is given by H.A.M. Klemann, Nederland 1938-1948.
Economie en samenleving in jaren van oorlog en bezetting (Amsterdam,
2002). A comprehensive survey of Dutch foreign policy in the interwar
period is given by R. Schuursma, Vergeefs onzijdig. Nederlands neutraliteit
1919-1940 (Utrecht 2005). An interesting comparison to the situation in
Belgium is provided by J. Vaesen, Tussen Scylla en Charybdis. De Belgische

militaire politiek en de economische crisis 1930-1939 (Brussels, 2003).
For an introduction to the parliamentary history of the period please
refer to: P.J. Oud, Honderd Jaren. Een eeuw van staatkundige vormgeving
in Nederland 1840-1940. Bewerkt en voor de periode na 1940 aangevuld
door J. Bosmans (Assen, 1979).��
The
��
rise of the right-wing political move-
ments in the Netherlands and media reports on Germany are dealt with
in, respectively: A.A. de Jonge, Crisis en critiek der democratie. Anti-
democratische stromingen en de daarin levende denkbeelden over de staat
in Nederland tussen de wereldoorlogen (Assen, 1968), and: F. van Vree, De
Nederlandse pers en Duitsland 1930-1939. Een studie over de vorming van
de publieke opinie (Groningen, 1989). The debate on the economic policy
of the Netherlands in the 1930s has been given a strong boost by: P.W.
Klein and G.J. Borger, De jaren dertig. Aspecten van crisis en werkeloosheid
(Amsterdam, 1979). An important work on the contribution made by H.
Colijn to pre-war defence policy is: H. Langeveld, Schipper naast God.
Hendrikus Colijn 1869-1944. Deel Twee 1933-1944 (Amsterdam, 2004).
See also: J. Houwink ten Cate, ‘Mannen van de daad’ en Duitsland, 1919-
1939. Het Hollandse zakenleven en de vooroorlogse buitenlandse politiek
(The Hague, 1995). The role of Queen Wilhelmina of the Netherlands in
defence matters has been described very accurately by C. Fasseur, Wil-
helmina. Krijgshaftig in een vormeloze jas (Amsterdam, 2001).
The Dutch policy of neutrality is dealt with in: C.B. Wels, Aloofness and
Neutrality. Studies on Dutch foreign relations and policy-making institutions
(Utrecht, 1982), while G. van Roon, Kleine landen in crisistijd.��
��
Van Oslo-
staten tot Benelux 1930-1940 (Amsterdam and Brussels, 1985) describes
the specific problems experienced by the small powers. An analysis of
the policy on the League of Nations can be found in R. van Diepen, Voor
Volkenbond en vrede. Nederland en het streven naar een nieuwe wereld-
orde 1919-1946 (Amsterdam, 1999). An excellent analysis of the way in
which the Dutch political and military authorities tried in vain from 1939
onwards to garner foreign support without overtly relinquishing their
policy of neutrality is given in: T. van Gent, Het falen van de Nederlandse
gewapende neutraliteit, september 1939-mei 1940 (Amsterdam, 2009). The
‘Venlo incident’ has been written about in the popular publication Jo-
han P. Nater, Het Venlo incident. De mysterieuze ontvoering met geweld op
Nederlands grondgebied door een SS-Sonderkommando in november 1939
(Rotterdam, s.a.).��
��
Other sources on the Venlo incident and the role of Ma-
jor G.J. Sas include the journalistic book B. Tigchelaar, De gemiste kans.
Staatsgreep tegen Hitler 1938. Officieren tussen moed en wanhoop (Zwolle,
2004).A clear and concise introduction to Dutch defence policy can be

found in: C.M. Schulten, “The Netherlands and its army (1900-1940)”,
Revue Internationale d’Histoire Militaire, LVIII (1984) 73-95. The history
of the origins of the army system of 1922 is dealt with in R.P.F. Bijkerk,
“W.F. Pop (1858-1931)” in: G. Teitler and W. Klinkert, eds, Kopstukken uit
de krijgsmacht. Nederlandse vlag- en opperofficieren 1815-1955 (Amster-
dam, 1997), 283-299. An older source of information is: H.J. Kruls and H.
Staring, Op de bres voor Neerlands onafhankelijkheid (Amsterdam, 1939).
There is also an unpublished manuscript by V.E. Nierstrasz on defence
policy between 1922 and 1939 entitled: “De voorgeschiedenis van 1922-
1939 (Het Nederlandse leger tussen de 1e en 2e Wereldoorlog)”, which is
held by the NIMH (collectie Voorgeschiedenis W.O. II. Nederland 1922-
1938, boxes 413b and 413c). We recommend two articles by F. Snapper
for the interesting data they contain: “De gevechtswaarde van de Neder-
landse landmacht in de periode 1914-1918 en 1940”, Mededelingen van de
Sectie Militaire Geschiedenis Landmachtstaf, III (1980) 16-54, and: “Enige
sterktecijfers betreffende de Nederlandse landmacht in de periode 1840-
1940”, Mededelingen van de Sectie Militaire Geschiedenis Landmachtstaf,
IV (1981) 80-118.
The discussion about the strategic policy to be pursued, prior to and
during mobilisation, has been well summarised in the abovementioned
volume 2 of: L. de Jong, Het Koninkrijk der Nederlanden in de Tweede
Wereldoorlog, while attention is also devoted to this topic in: V.E Nier-
strasz, Inleiding en Algemeen Overzicht van de gevechtsdagen 10-19 mei
1940 (The Hague, 1957).��
A
��
number of original documents about war pol-
icy are published in: Enquêtecommissie regeringsbeleid 1940-1945. Verslag
houdende de uitkomsten van het onderzoek. Deel 1b. Bijlagen (The Hague,
1949), annexes 5, 16, 17 and 18.
J.C.H. Blom has advocated further investigation into and re-evaluation
of Dutch pre-war defence policy in: J.C.H. Blom, “‘Durch kamen sie doch’.
Het Nederlandse defensiebeleid in de jaren dertig opnieuw beschouwd”
in: G. Teitler, ed., Tussen crisis en oorlog. Maatschappij en krijgsmacht in de
jaren ’30 (Dieren, 1984) 116-143. A response to this is: F. Snapper, “‘Durch
kamen sie doch’.��
��
Dankzij de luchtmacht.��
��
De defensie gedurende de peri-
ode 1929-1938 in Europa, Japan en de Verenigde Staten”, Mededelingen
van de Sectie Militaire Geschiedenis Landmachtstaf, IX (1986) 43-71, to
which Blom in turn replied with: “Over geld en gevechtskracht.��
��
Een reac-
tie”, Ibidem, 72-74. See also: H.L. Zwitzer and P.H. Kamphuis, “De afbraak
van de Nederlandse defensie tijdens het interbellum”, Carré, (July/August
1981) 32-35. In this context, one should also refer to H. Amersfoort, Een
harmonisch leger voor Nederland. Oorlogsbeeld, strategie en operationele

planning van het Nederlandse leger in het Interbellum (inaugural lecture,
Breda, 2007).
In the abovementioned volume Tussen crisis en oorlog. Maatschappij en
krijgsmacht in de jaren ’30, G. Teitler demonstrates in: “De krijgsmacht
als Cassandra. Toekomstverwachtingen van Nederlandse militairen”, 70-
87, that the armed forces were well aware of the modern methods of war-
fare. Other interesting articles from this volume are: H.W. von der Dunk,
“Neutralisme en defensie: het dilemma in de jaren dertig”, 5-23; J.A.M.M.
Janssen, “Kerk, coalitie en defensie in het Interbellum”, 42-62, and: H.J.L.
Vonhof, “Defensiepolitiek van Liberalen en Vrijzinnig-Democraten in de
jaren dertig”, 63-69.
The mobilisation is dealt with in: W. Klinkert, J.W.M. Schulten and L.
de Vos, eds, Mobilisatie in Nederland en België 1870-1914-1939 (Amster-
dam, 1991), and: F. Snapper, “De mobilisatie 1939/1940 en de oorlogs-
dagen van mei 1940”, De Militaire Spectator, CXL (1971) 450-459. An
illustrated report of the mobilisaton period is given by J. Zwaan, De mobi-
lisatiemaanden 1939-1940. Beelden uit de mobilisatie van 29 augustus 1939
tot 9 mei 1940 en de voormobilisatie van 27 september 1938 tot 28 augustus
1939 (Amsterdam and Alphen aan den Rijn, 1979). There are also many,
often richly illustrated regional works on the mobilisation. One example
is: M. Brink and C. Cramer, Ergens in Nederland... Herdenking mobilisatie
1939-1989 (Veenendaal, 1989), which focuses chiefly on the Grebbe Line.
Other typical photographic books are: J. Klingens: Het paardenvolk in mei
1940. Panorama van de veldartillerie (Amsterdam, [1985]), and, by the
same author: Het krijgsvolk van weleer. Panorama van leger, luchtmacht en
marine in mei 1940 (Voorburg, s.a.). There is a sympathetic biography of
Commander-in-Chief Winkelman: T. van Middelkoop, Een soldaat doet
zijn plicht. Generaal H.G. Winkelman, zijn leven en betekenis als militair
1876-1952 (Zaltbommel, 2002). A rather one-sided biography of his pre-
decessor is provided by E.H. Brongers, Generaal Reynders. Een miskend
bevelhebber 1939-1940 (Soesterberg, 2007). The change of high command
is analysed in P.W.M. Hasselton, De wisseling van het opperbevel in febru-
ari 1940 getoetst aan de praktijk van de Oorlogswet in de periode 1887-
1940 (Venlo, 1995). The problematic position of the commander-in-chief
in Dutch political relations is discussed in H. Amersfoort, ed., Een kwestie
van vertrouwen.��
��
De geschiedenis van het opperbevel in Nederland en Neder-
lands-Indië (The Hague, 2001), an annex to J. Franssen et al., Van wankel
evenwicht naar versterkte defensieorganisatie.��
Advies
��
van de Adviescom-
missie Opperbevelhebberschap (The Hague, 19 April 2002).
Pre-war policy with respect to air defence and the role of the air force
during mobilisation are described in: R. de Bruin et al., Illusies en inci-
denten. De militaire luchtvaart en de neutraliteitshandhaving tot 10 mei
1940 (The Hague, [1988]). The history of the navy in the interwar period
is described concisely in: Ph.M. Bosscher, “Bezuiniging en oorlog 1918-
1945” in: G.J.A. Raven, ed., De kroon op het anker. 175 jaar Koninklijke
Marine (Amsterdam, 1988). Aspects of the materiel policy are dealt with
in: H.J.G. Beunders, Weg met de Vlootwet! De maritieme bewapenings-
politiek van het kabinet Ruys de Beerenbrouck en het succesvolle verzet
daartegen in 1923 (Bergen, 1984). One could also refer to the somewhat
unsatisfactory book on the Corps of Police Troops: J.P.E.G. Smeets, De
Politietroepen 1919-1940. De politie-militair als steunpilaar van het wettig
gezag (Soest, 1997).
Chapter Four
The two-part bibliography by Walter Held is essential when studying Ger-

man military history. In addition to listing published war histories and
journal articles, it also contains a survey of the German post-war Tradi-
tionsverbände. Walter Held, ed., Verbände und Truppen der deutschen
Wehrmacht und Waffen-SS im Zweiten Weltkrieg. Eine Bibliographie der
deutschsprachigen Nachkriegsliteratur (2 volumes; Osnabrück, 1978-1983).
German military history of the Second World War is dealt with com-
prehensively in the series Das deutsche Reich und der Zweite Weltkrieg.
This standard work, published under the auspices of the Bundeswehr’s
Militärgeschichtliches Forschungsamt, comprises eleven volumes. For the
build-up of the Wehrmacht and the preparation and execution of Fall
Gelb, the following are of importance: Wilhelm Deist et al., Das deutsche
Reich und der Zweite Weltkrieg. Band I. Ursachen und Voraussetzungen
der deutschen Kriegspolitik (Stuttgart, 1979); A. Maier et al., Das deutsche
Reich und der Zweite Weltkrieg. Band 2. Die Errichtung der Hegemonie auf
dem europäischen Kontinent (Stuttgart, 1979), and: Bernhard R. Kroener,
Rolf-Dieter Müller and Hans Umbreit, Das deutsche Reich und der Zweite
Weltkrieg.��
��
Band 5. Organisation und Mobilmachung des deutschen Macht-
bereichs. Erster Halbband. Kriegsverwaltung, Wirtschaft und personelle
Ressourcen 1939-1941 (Stuttgart, 1987).
The history of the Reichswehr is dealt with in: M. Geyer, Aufrüstung
oder Sicherheit. Reichswehr in der Krise der Machtspolitik 1924-1936 (Wies-
baden, 1980). See also: B. Mueller-Hillebrand, Das Heer 1933-1945. �� Ent-
wicklung des organisatorischen Aufbaues. Band
��
I. Das Heer bis zum Kriegs-
beginn (Darmstadt, 1954); F.L. Carsten, Reichswehr und Politik, 1918-1933

(Cologne and Berlin, 1964), and: Edgar Graf von Matuschka and Rainer
Wohlfeil, Reichswehr und Republik (1918-1933) (Frankfurt am Main,
1970). A short Dutch-language survey is: M.M.A. Roeder, “Het Duitse
leger in het Derde Rijk (1933-1945)”, Spiegel Historiael, XXIV (1989) 210-
215. A comparison of the innovations with respect to conducting war in
France, Britain and Germany is given by W. Murray en A.R. Millet, eds,
Military innovation in the interwar period (Cambridge, 1998). A general
survey of German military history can be found in K.-V. Neugebauer,
Grundzüge der deutschen Militärgeschichte (2 volumes; Freiburg, 1993).
The background to the build-up and deployment of the Luftwaffe are
dealt with in detail in: H. Boog, Die deutsche Luftwaffenführung 1935-
1945. Führungsprobleme, Spitzengliederung, Generalstabsausbildung
(Stuttgart, 1982); Karl Köhler and Karl-Heinz Hummel, “Die Organisa-
tion der Luftwaffe 1933-1939” in: Wehrmacht und Nationalsozialismus
1933-1939 (Munich, 1978), and: Karl-Heinz Völker, Die deutsche Luft-
waffe 1933-1939. Aufbau, Führung und Rüstung der Luftwaffe sowie die
Entwicklung der deutschen Luftkriegstheorie (Stuttgart, 1967).
A survey of German tactical and operational doctrines is given by: Je-
huda L. Wallach, Das Dogma der Vernichtungsschlacht. Die Lehren von
Clausewitz und Schlieffen und ihre Wertungen in zwei Weltkriegen (Frank-
furt am Main, 1967); Martin van Creveld, Fighting power. German and
U.S. performance 1939-1945 (London, 1983); Robert J. O’Neill, “Doctrine
and training in the German army, 1919-1939” in: Michael Howard, ed.,
The theory and practice of war (Bloomington, 1965) 143-165. An essen-
tial volume for gaining insight into the German military issues is: Klaus-
Jürgen Müller, General Ludwig Beck, Studien und Dokumente zur poli-
tisch-militärischen Vorstellungswelt und Tätigkeit des Generalstabchefs des
deutschen Heeres 1933-1938 (Boppard am Rhein, 1980).
The history of the Sturmabteilung is described well in: Peter Longerich,
Die braunen Bataillone. Geschichte der SA (Munich, 1989).��
The
��
many pub-
lications on the SS include the following noteworthy books: Bernd Weg-
ner, Hitlers politische Soldaten.��
��
Die Waffen-SS 1933-1945. Studien zu Leit-
bild, Struktur und Funktion einer nationalsozialistischen Elite (Paderborn,
1982); Rudolf Lehmann, Die Leibstandarte. Band I (Osnabrück, 1978),
and: Heinz Höhne, Der Orden unter dem Totenkopf. Die Geschichte der
SS (Munich, 2002). The introduction to N.K.C.A. in ’t Veld, De SS en Ne-
derland. Documenten uit SS-archieven 1935-1945 (2 volumes; The Hague,
1976) also provides a great deal of information about the history of the SS.
Over the years, access to German primary sources has been increased
substantially by various source publications. Those concerning Fall Gelb
are: Hans-Adolf Jacobsen, ed., Dokumente zur Vorgeschichte des West-
feldzuges 1939-1940 (Göttingen, Berlin and Frankfurt, 1956); Walther
Hubatsch, Hitlers Weisungen für die Kriegsführung 1932-1945. Dokumente
des Oberkommandos der Wehrmacht (2nd impression; Koblenz, 1983),
and: Die Berichte des Oberkommandos der Wehrmacht 1939-1945 Band I.
1. September 1939 bis 31. Dezember 1940 (Munich: Verlag für Wehrwissen-
schaften,1983). An authoritative study on the origins of Fall Gelb remains:
Hans-Adolf Jacobsen, Fall Gelb. Der Kampf um den deutschen Operations-
plan zur Westoffensive 1940 (Wiesbaden, 1957). The best study on this
which is currently available is Karl-Heinz Frieser, Blitzkrieg-Legende. Der
Westfeldzug 1940 (Munich, 1995). It is also available in translation: The
Blitzkrieg Legend: The 1940 Campaign in the West (Annapolis, 2005).
Good information on the most important German generals who were
involved in the attack on the Netherlands can be found in: Richard Brett-
Smith, Hitler’s generals (San Rafael, 1977). It is certainly worth reading
the memoirs of the German military attaché in Brussels and The Hague,
Friedrich-Carl Rabe von Pappenheim, Erinnerungen des Soldaten und
Diplomaten 1914-1955 (Osnabrück, 1987). Hitler’s air force aide-de-camp,
Nicolaus von Below, gives a fascinating description of the events at the
Führerhauptquartier in Als Hitlers Adjudant 1937-45 (Mainz, 1980).
Chapter Five
In view of the fact that almost the entire archive of the Dutch General
Headquarters (AHK) was destroyed in The Hague’s rubbish incinerators
following the capitulation, there are few sources on the decision-making
by Winkelman and his staff. Lieutenant General H.F.M. baron van Voorst
tot Voorst wrote a report from memory in 1940 on the AHK’s view of the
battle, and this was included in the reports published by the Government
Policy 1940-1945 Inquiry Committee: “Notities van luitenant-generaal
H.F.M. van Voorst tot Voorst over de mobilisatie 1939/1940 en de Mei-
dagen 1940” in: Enquêtecommissie Regeringsbeleid 1940-1945. Verslag
houdende de uitkomsten van het onderzoek. Deel 1b. Bijlagen (The Hague,
1949) 96-114 [annex 59].��
��
The committee’s reports also contain an over-
view by Lieutenant Colonel J.J.C.P. Wilson of the decisions taken at the
AHK, drawn up immediately following capitulation at the request of Gen-
eral Winkelman. The overview is, however, confined to 10 and 11 May as
Wilson was sent to Rotterdam on 12 May: J.J.C.P. Wilson, “Globaal ver-
slag van de op 10 en 11 mei genomen beslissingen bij het A.H.K. (Sectie

1), opgesteld door het hoofd van de ‘sectie operatiën’ van het algemeen
hoofdkwartier” in: Ibidem, 61-62 [annex 33]. A thorough reconstruction
of the events at headquarters is given by V.E. Nierstrasz on pages 63-128
of his Inleiding en algemeen overzicht van de gevechtsdagen van 10-19 mei
1940 (The Hague, 1957), which was published as part III/subsection 1 of
what is often referred to as the ‘green series’.��
This
��
term refers to the co-
lour of the binding of the multi-volumed standard work, the official title
of which is: De strijd op Nederlands grondgebied tijdens de Wereldoorlog II.
See also: T. van Middelkoop, Een soldaat doet zijn plicht. Generaal H.G.
Winkelman, zijn leven en betekenis als militair 1876-1952 (Zaltbommel,
2002).��
��
Interesting contributions are also made by: J.P.B. Jonker, A.E. Ker-
sten and G.N. van der Plaat, eds, Vijftig jaar na de inval. Geschiedschrij-
ving en Tweede Wereldoorlog (The Hague, 1990).
For the German side, please refer to the following source publication:
Hans-Adolf Jacobsen, ed., Dokumente zum Westfeldzug 1940 (Göttingen,
Berlin and Frankfurt, 1960). The detailed Kriegstagebücher can also be
consulted.
Chapter Six
As early as 1940-1942, De Militaire Spectator featured a number of articles

about the fighting around The Hague, which often included personal ex-
periences. What is striking is that in the initial years of the German occu-
pation this theatre of war attracted much attention. The articles which ap-
peared in De Militaire Spectator are: J. Moorman, “Het Ie Depot Infanterie
bij de verdediging van Den Haag, Wassenaar en Ypenburg”, De Militaire
Spectator, CIX (1940) 293-304 and 346-350; W.F. van Gunsteren, “Mijn
belevingen bij Valkenburg 10-13 mei 1940”, De Militaire Spectator, CIX
(1940) 453-455; E.L. van Swieten, “Een episode uit den strijd om Ocken-
burg. 10 t.m. 12 mei 1940”, De Militaire Spectator, CIX (1940) 490-507;
J.W.R. Brueren, “Uit de krijgsverrichtingen van het Ie Depot Infanterie”,
De Militaire Spectator, CX (1941) 44-45; D.A. van Hilten, “De gevechten
op en om het vliegveld Valkenburg op 10 mei 1940”, De Militaire Specta-
tor, CX (1941) 57-61; B.J.H. van Roosmalen, “De gevechten op en om het
vliegveld Ockenburg en in Loosduinen en omgeving”, De Militaire Specta-
tor, CX (1941) 281-304; D.A. van Hilten, “De overval op het staf-kwartier
van de Groep ’s-Gravenhage van het Westfront Vesting Holland in den
nacht 11/12 mei 1940”, De Militaire Spectator, CX (1941) 399-408; T.W.M.
van Grotenhuis van Onstein, “De gevechtshandelingen van het II bataljon
Grenadiers van 10-14 mei 1940”, De Militaire Spectator, CX (1941) 438-

451, and: H.J.J.W. Dürst Britt, “Gebeurtenissen bij III-2 R.A. van 10 tot en
met 14 mei 1940”, De Militaire Spectator, CXI (1942) 137-147. Several re-
collections also appeared in Mavors. Maandschrift voor officieren en reserve-
officieren van alle wapens en diensten: W. de Vletter, “Uit mijn oorlogs-
dagboek”, Mavors, XXXIV (1940) 669-676 and XXXV (1941) 47-55; . N.
Hubbeling, “Tijdens de oorlogsdagen in het IIe depot ber. artillerie (Voor-
schoten)”, Mavors, XXXV (1941) 182-192, and: J. van Kessel, “De strijd op
en om een vliegveld”, Mavors, XXXV (1941) 257-280.
More appeared immediately after the war: A.T.C. Opsomer, “De ver-
dediging van het vliegveld ‘Ockenburg’ door de 22ste Depotcompagnie
Bewakingstroepen op 10 mei 1940”, De Militaire Spectator, CXIV (1945)
13-22; “De herovering van het vliegveld Ockenburg”, De Militaire Specta-
tor, CXIV (1945) 69-71, and: J. van Benthem, “Verslag van een overval op
het vliegveld Ypenburg op vrijdag 10 mei 1940”, Ons Leger, XXXII (1948)
29-34. An account which captures the mood but does not include much
relevant detail can be found in: H. Kuiper, Ypenburg. Onze strijd tegen de
parachutisten (Sneek, 1946). Further references include: C.A. de Bruyn and
A.C. Verschoor, eds, Gedenkboek voor de vrijwillige Landstormkorpsen,
Luchtwachtdienst en Luchtafweerdienst (Leiden, 1949).
All these mostly personal reports and accounts, along with the official
battle reports, helped to form the basis for the part of the ‘green series’
that deals with the battle within Fortress Holland: C.D. Kamerling, Alge-
meen overzicht van de strijd om en in de Vesting Holland (zonder het Oost-
front) en de strijd tegen de luchtlandingstroepen rondom ’s-Gravenhage mei
1940 (The Hague, 1954). Another reference is of course: F.J. Molenaar, De
luchtverdediging mei 1940, (The Hague, 1970). J. Sjoerds wrote: “Leider-
schap, gezag en verantwoordelijkheid. Krijgsgeschiedkundige voorbeelden
uit de strijd om Ypenburg”, De Militaire Spectator, CXXV (1956) 612-619,
and anyone who wishes to know more about the deployment of Dutch ar-
moured vehicles at the airfields should consult: F. Vos, “Pantservoertuigen
van het vooroorlogse Nederlandse leger. Herinnering aan de strijd om het
vliegveld Ockenburg”, Ons Leger, LV-2 (1971) 5-7 and LV-3 (1971) 30-33.
E.H. Brongers, De slag om de residentie (Soesterberg, 2004) is of particular
interest because of the comprehensive reproduction of quotations from
eyewitness reports. Brongers also wrote: “Generalleutnant Hans Graf von
Sponeck”, Mars et Historia, XXIII-4 (1989) 11-20. More recently, he wrote:
De slag om Ypenburg. Mei 1940 (Rijswijk, 2000).
Virtually all German sources about the airborne landings have been
lost, so the following reference will have to suffice: F.A. von Metzsch, Die
Geschichte der 22. Infanterie-Division. 1939-1945 (Kiel, 1952). The details

in this book have been incorporated by Kamerling and Molenaar in their
works about the war. Other German books about the airborne landings
in the Netherlands which briefly cover the fighting around The Hague are
mentioned under Chapter 10. For an analysis of the significance of the
German aircraft losses, see J.N. Fernhout, “Het verband tussen de Luft-
waffe-verliezen in mei ’40 en de Duitse invasieplannen voor Engeland”,
Militaire Spectator, CLXI (1992) 364-371. An English-language account of
the airborne landings in Fortress Holland is provided by B. Perrett, Seize
and hold. Masterstrokes on the battlefield (London, 1994) 60-81. The for-
tunes of an anti-aircraft defence battery are recounted in B.C. Dresens,
De geschiedenis van de 13e batterij Lu.A. 1939-1940. Oorzaken en gevol-
gen van de gebeurtenissen bij de 13e batterij Lu.A. en andere batterijen
(Grollo, 2002). A well-written airfield history is given by J.H. Schuurman,
Vliegveld Bergen NH 1938-1945 (Bergen, 2001).
Chapter Seven
The foremost work on the brief struggle in southern Limburg is from the
‘green series’: C.D. Kamerling, De krijgsverrichtingen in Zuid-Limburg.
Mei 1940 (The Hague, 1952). E.H. Brongers wrote a popular work about
this struggle entitled Een dag oorlog in Zuid-Limburg (Baarn, 1973).
On the subject of the defence by the Maas-Waal Group and the Betu-
we Group, the ‘green series’ includes: V.E. Niertrasz and A. van der Wiel,
De verdediging van het Maas-Waalkanaal en de Over-Betuwe. Mei 1940
(The Hague, 1952). The fighting in the Maas Line was of particular inter-
est to J.J.C.P. Wilson, who wrote various articles on the subject: “Enkele
algemene gegevens betreffende de Maaslinie”, De Militaire Spectator, CX
(1941) 211-220; “Het gevecht bij Grubbenvorst”, De Militaire Spectator, CX
(1941) 221-232; “Het gevecht bij Boxmeer en Sambeek”, De Militaire Spec-
tator, CX (1941) 319-353; “Het gevecht bij Mook”, De Militaire Spectator,
CXI (1942) 71-92, and: “Het gevecht bij Wessem”, De Militaire Spectator,
CXIV (1945) 111-133. P. van Haren, G.A. Gerards and H. van Dijk also
compiled Standhouden... 10 mei 1940. Het verhaal van 12 uren oorlog in
Katwijk, Cuijk, St. Agatha en Oeffelt (Cuijk, 1981), a commemorative book
describing the actions of the IInd battalion of the 26th Infantry Regiment.
J.P.C.M. van Hoof wrote “De 8 staal in de Maaslinie, 10 mei 1940”, Mars et
Historia, XIV (1980) 169-172 and 201-205, and: “Nogmaals de 8-staal in
de Maaslinie”, Mars et Historia, XIX (1985) 24-29. In the 1963 and 1964
volumes, S.L.Groenewoud wrote a series about “Gebeurtenissen in ’40
rondom ‘achtstaals’”. The 8-Staal gun in the Maas Line and in the Peel-
Raam Position are looked at in: “De Maaslinie”, Ons Leger, XLVII-9 (1963)
21-24; “De Peel-Raamstelling: de Rips-Noord (II-20 RA)”, Ons Leger,
XLVIII-1 (1964) 21-22; “De Peel-Raamstelling: Zeeland-Mill”, Ons Leger,
XLVIII-2 (1964) 16-19; “De Peel-Raamstelling: Maarheeze-Weert I-20
R.A.”, Ons Leger, XLVIII-4 (1964) 13-14, and “De Peel-Raamstelling (I-20
R.A.)”, Ons Leger, XLVIII-6 (1964) 15-18. See also H.A. Robbé Groskamp,
Artillerie 1880 in Mill 1940 (Utrecht, 1997). In H.J. Mulder en de strijd bij
Mill. Een episode uit de Nederlandse artilleriegeschiedenis (2nd impression;
The Hague, 1993), H.W. van den Doel looks at the fighting at this im-
portant intersection. Further publications are: H. Ringoir, “Verraderlijke
overval op de brug bij Heumen. Herinnering aan de meidagen van 1949”,
Ons Leger, LIV-4/5 (1970) 36-40; A.H. Paape, “Doorbraak naar de Peel.
De overval op de brug bij Gennep” in: A.H. Paape et al., eds, Bericht van
de tweede wereldoorlog (Amsterdam, 1970-1975) 338-339, and: N.K.C.A.
in ’t Veld, “Sport en spel. De voorbereidingen voor de brugovervallen” in:
Ibidem, 343-345. The following popular work was written about the Bau-
Lehrbataillon zur besondere Verwendung 800: Herbert Kriegsheim, Getarnt,
Getäuscht und doch Getreu. Die geheimnisvollen ‘Brandenburger’ (Berlin,
1958). A more recent publication is H. Bentzien, Division Brandenburg.
Die Rangers von Admiral Canaris (Berlin, 2004).
A comprehensive account of the operations of the Dutch troops in
northern Limburg and Noord-Brabant is given in: V.E. Nierstrasz, De
verdediging van Noord-Limburg en Noord-Brabant. Mei 1940 (The Hague,
1953), a volume in the ‘green series’, and: E.H. Brongers, Opmars naar
Rotterdam. Deel 2. Van Maas tot Moerdijk (Baarn, 1982). Both books,
however, give a disproportionately large amount of coverage to the fight-
ing along the Maas Line. A. Claassens and G. de Kruijf, eds, Het gevecht
bij Mill. Herdenkingsboek ‘10 mei 1940 Mill’ (Mill 1980) is a commemora-
tive work, which includes many source fragments. J.J.C.P. Wilson wrote:
“Het gevecht bij Mill”, De Militaire Spectator, CX (1941) 79-127. Another
publication about the Peel-Raam Position and the Maas Line is: J.S. van
Wieringen, “De kazematten van de Peel-Raamstelling en van de Maaslinie
en wat er van over is”, Terugblik. Maandblad van de Documentatiegroep
’40-’45, XXVI (1988) 26-45.
Another publication to appear immediately after the war, written by
Reserve Major E.P. Weber, was De vuurproef van het grensbataljon. Beleve-
nissen van het Ie Bataljon 26e Regiment Infanterie tijdens den Nederlandsch-
Duitschen oorlog van 10-15 mei 1940 (Arnhem, 1946). A reserve warrant
officer from the 27th Infantry Regiment, L. Huizingh, also put his recollec-
tions on paper in: Terugtocht uit de Peel. Journaal van een Nederlandsch
soldaat van 10 mei tot 8 juni over zijn terugtocht door Nederland, België,
Frankrijk, Luxemburg en Duitschland (The Hague, 1940). An uncompli-
cated work is: H. Lina, Dagboek van een motorordonnans. Herinneringen
van een Grens-motor-ordonnans–van den Peeldivisie 2-19 mei 1940 (Am-
sterdam, s.a.). Other published recollections are: A. de Kloet, “Verslag van
C.-III-30 R.I. over de periode 9 mei 1940-14 mei 1940”, Mavors, XXXV
(1941) 65-84; A.J.R. Buijtelaar, “I-27 R.I. in de verdediging”, Mavors,
XXXV (1941) 85-94; H. Peters, “Uit het dagboek van het 2e Grensbatal-
jon”, Mavors, XXXV (1941) 33-46, and: H.A.J.A. Peters, “Het 2e Grens-
bataljon bij den terugtocht van de Maas naar de Peelstelling”, Mavors,
XXXV (1941) 167-169. A.M. van der Rijken, Zimpe zampe zompe in de
Peel (Eindhoven, 1981) is little more than a book for boys.
A.G.J.M.F. van der Kroon, “Het gevecht bij de brug van Keizersveer (13
mei 1940)”, De Militaire Spectator, CXI (1942) 37-65, provides detailed
accounts of the skirmishes at Keizersveer that were only briefly touched
upon in the chapter. The events in Bergen op Zoom are covered in E.G.H.
Härtel, Vijf dolle dagen... in mei 1940 (Bergen op Zoom, 1984). On Wil-
lemstad, D.J. Leij wrote Willemstads panorama. Mobilisatie zuidfront Ves-
ting Holland meidagen 1940 (Oosterhout, 2000). On Bergen op Zoom,
there is J.A.F.M. Luijten, Bergen op Zoom. De verdediging door het Franse
leger (Soesterberg, 2004). Publications on the German side are: C.H. Her-
mann, 68 Kriegsmonate. Der Weg der 9. Panzerdivision durch den Zweiten
Weltkrieg (Vienna, 1975). Barbara Selz, Das grüne Regiment. Der Weg der
256. Infanterie-Division aus der Sicht des Regiments 481 (Freiburg im Breis-
gau, 1970), and: Unteroffizier Apel, “Das Unternehmen des Panzerzuges 1”,
Militär-Wochenblatt. Unabhängige Zeitschrift für die deutsche Wehrmacht,
CXXV (1940) 1044-1045.
The French have also played their part in the historiography about May
1940 in the Netherlands. However, in P. Paillart, Les quarante jours du 2e
G.R.C.A. en Hollande, en Belgique et en France. 10 mai-18 juin 1940 (Ab-
beville, s.a.), and: Général de division Jean Molinié, La 25e division mo-
torisée dans la bataille de France. Division d’Auvergne (de Breda à Lille et
à Dunkerque) (Leroux, 1956), the operations on Dutch territory are of
secondary importance. Particularly informative is also: M. Lerecouvreux,
L’ Armée Giraud en Hollande 1939-1940 (Paris, 1951), and some technical
information about the French forces can be found in: F. Vos, “De Franse
bondgenoot in de meidagen van 1940”, Ons Leger, LVI-7/8 (1972) 16-20
and LVI-9 (1972) 15-19. Further references are: H. van der Tuin, “La dé-
fense de Bergen op Zoom par l’armée française (mai 1940)”, Revue his-
torique des armées, XXVIII (1973) 90-109, and: D.W. Alexander, “Reper-
cussions of the Breda variant”, French historical studies, VIII (1972-1973)
459-488. There is also the previously cited B. Chaix, En Mai 1940, Fallait-il
entrer en Belgique? Décisions stratégiques et plans opérationnels de la cam-
pagne de France (Paris, 2000).
On the fighting in Zeeland, the ‘green series’ includes: C.D. Kamerling,
De strijd in Zeeland. Mei 1940 (The Hague, 1954). In 1980, H. Amersfoort
also wrote the informative “Zeeuwse toestanden. Bevelvoering en besluit-
vorming op Zuid-Beveland, 14-15 mei 1940”, Militaire Spectator, CXLIX
(1980) 227-249. May 1940 is also covered in L.W. de Bree, Zeeland 1940-
1945 (Middelburg, 1979). Also dedicated to this subject is J.N. Houter-
man, “Deutschland” verovert Zeeland. De Duitse inval in Zeeland Mei 1940
(Middelburg, 1991). In the style of a boys’ book is W. Abeleven-Labber-
ton, Zeeland vocht door… (Utrecht, s.a.). In 1940, Wim Brandt wrote about
the SS Verfügungsdivision’s Aufklärungsabteilung which was operating in
Zeeland: “Aus dem Feldzug in Holland. Eine motorisierte Aufklärungs-
Abteilung im Westen”, Militär-Wochenblatt. Unabhängige Zeitschrift für
die deutsche Wehrmacht, CXXV (1940) 417-420. A brief biographical out-
line of général de brigade Marcel Deslaurens is included in “Les officiers
généraux français morts au cours des opérations de mai-juin 1940”, Revue
historique des armées, XXXIV-4 (1979) 220-241. See also: Captain Bichon,
“Het verhaal van de dood van generaal Deslaurens”, Maandorgaan van de
Documentatiegroep ’40-’45, XIX (1981) 214-217 and 256-260. H.A.J.A. Pe-
ters, the cantonment commander of St. Laurens, a small town to the north
of Middelburg, wrote: “De laatste onderdeelen van het Ned. Leger in Zee-
land geven zich over”, Mavors, XXXV (1941) 173-175, and: “Van Middel-
burg naar Vlissingen”, Ibidem, 177-181. A detailed account of the fighting
at the Sloedam is given by R.E. Hoebeke in Slagveld Sloedam (Nieuw- en
Sint Joosland, 2002) 44-168.
Chapter Eight
By far the most important source on the fighting in Overijssel and Gel-
derland is: A. van der Wiel and V.E. Nierstrasz, De krijgsverrichtingen ten
oosten van de IJssel en in de IJssellinie. Mei 1940 (The Hague, 1952). There
are, however, a few inaccuracies in this work, although these are corrected
in a later work by V. E. Nierstrasz entitled Inleiding en algemeen overzicht
van de gevechtsdagen van 10-19 mei 1940 (The Hague, 1957). A pub-
lication on the mobilisation and May 1940 in Twente is: C.B. Cornelis-
sen, Storm uit het noorden. Mobilisatie en Duitse inval in Twente 1939-
1940 (Oldenzaal, 1985). In their book De Pruus komt! Overijssel in de

Tweede Wereldoorlog (Zwolle, 1990), which is certainly worth reading, C.
Hilbrink, M. Kienhuis and K. Vos commend the way in which the border
battalions performed their task. A personal report from the IJssel Line is
offered by T. Wassenaar, Douwe Wassenaar. Soldaat in een roerige tijd (S.l.,
1997)
The history of the Grebbe Line in early times is described briefly in
J.C.T. van Blommestein, De Grebbelinie. Van militair verdedigingswerk
tot cultuurhistorisch erfgoed en natuurmonument (S.l., 1978). See also S.J.
van Wieringen, “De kazematten van de Grebbelinie en wat er van over
is”, Terugblik. Maandblad van de Documentatiegroep 40-45, XXIV (1986)
150-164. For the history of Ede in May 1940, see E. van de Weerd and G.
Crebolder, Ede in wapenrok. Twee eeuwen militaire geschiedenis in de ge-
meente Ede (S.l., 2004).
Immediately after May 1940, several articles about the fighting on the
Grebbeberg appeared in De Militaire Spectator: J. Visser, “Het 16de Regi-
ment Infanterie in de Grebbestelling en in de Vesting Holland”, De Mili-
taire Spectator, CIX (1940) 406-414; V.E. Nierstrasz, “Hoe majoor W.P.
Landzaat, commandant van I-8 RI, op 13 mei 1940 op den Grebbeberg
sneuvelde”, De Militaire Spectator, CIX (1940) 366-369 and 432-433; V.E.
Nierstrasz, “Het sneuvelen van majoor J.H.A. Jacometti, commandant
van II-8 R.I. op 12 mei 1940 en de verdediging door luitenant-kolonel
W.F. Hennink, C.-8 R.I. van zijn commandopost op 13 en 14 mei 1940
op den Grebbeberg”, De Militaire Spectator, CIX (1940) 508-518, and:
V.E. Nierstrasz, “De lichte troepen van de Valleistelling (Grebbelinie), in
het bijzonder I R.H. op 12 mei 1940”, De Militaire Spectator, CX (1941)
247-260. These articles can of course also be found in: Onze oorlog 10-14
mei 1940. Verzameling van publicaties van de krijgsgeschiedkundige sectie
van het Hoofdregelingsbureau en andere artikelen, verschenen in Militaire
Spectator Juni 1940-Juli 1941 (The Hague, 1941). Other articles written al-
most immediately after the fighting were: L.P.R. Haring, “De 2e sectie van
2-II-11 R.I. van 7 tot 15 mei”, Mavors, XXXIV (1940) 705-726, and: J. van
der Heijden, “Op voorposten. Korte episode uit de oorlogsdagen van mei
1940”, Mavors, XXXV (1941) 145-156. A successful corps history is pro-
vided by S.J. de Groot, Vestingartillerie in het Veldleger. 19 RA in de Greb-
belinie en Betuwe 1940 (Amsterdam, 2002). Another good publication is
J.J. van Heyst, Dagboek van 2e Compagnie, Ie Bataljon, 24e Regiment Infan-
terie (Rijswijk, 2000). The attack by the German 227. Infanteriedivision at
Scherpenzeel is described by V.E. Nierstrasz in: “De op 13 mei 1940 bij
Scherpenzeel tot staan gebrachte aanval van de Duitse 227e divisie”, Ons
Leger, XLV-6 (1961) 5-9. The most complete work about the operations
of the Field Army, also written by Nierstrasz and part of the ‘green series’,
is De operatiën van het Veldleger en het Oostfront van de Vesting Holland.
Mei 1940 (The Hague, 1955). The history of the SS Standarte ‘Der Führer’
was recorded by the former SS Obersturmbannführer Otto Weidinger in:
Kameraden bis zum Ende. Das SS-Panzergrenadier-Regiment “DF” 1938-
1945 (Coburg, 1999). This ex-SS officer, however, views history through
tinted glasses and, for the actions in the Netherlands, virtually copies
the regiment’s Auszug aus dem Kriegstagebuch held by the Netherlands
Institute of Military History. And then there is the latest reprint of E.H.
Brongers, Grebbelinie 1940 (Soesterberg, 2002). A useful and informative
introduction is provided by the website of the De Greb Foundation: www.
grebbeberg.nl.
Immediately after May 1940, a number of popular works were written
by eyewitnesses: H. van Heerde, Tusschen vuur en ijzer (Meppel, 1940);
Corporal Homa, Onze 80-urige oorlog. Belevenissen in en om de Grebbe-
linie (Amsterdam, 1941); H. van Hoof, Z.66. Een verhaal van een com-
mandopost ergens in de Grebbelinie (Amsterdam, 1940), and: N.J.A. van
Exel and J. Gerritsen, Ons werk aan de Grebbe (Amsterdam, 1940). The
last book is about the work of the chaplains on the Grebbeberg. Written
about the mobilisation period in the 44th Infantry Regiment’s IInd battal-
ion, stationed at Ochten in the Betuwe, was W. Jonasse, “Mobilisatie ’39-
’40 bij II-44 R.I.”, Terugblik. Maandblad van de Documentatiegroep ’40-’45,
XXVI (1988) 61-88.
An important publication regarding the death sentence of Sergeant J.C.
Meijer is the Organisatie-besluit Rechtspleging te velde 1940 (Staatsblad,
1940 no. 283). This was published in the Militair Rechtelijk Tijdschrift,
XXXVI (1940-41) 4-6, as indeed was Meijer’s death sentence, which can
be found on pages 139-141. Meijer’s case was the subject of a legal debate
at the end of the 1960s. For this, see J. Leyten, “Een voorbeeld”, Nederlands
Juristenblad, XLII (1967) 385-386, and: A. Berkhout, “Eén voorbeeld”,
Nederlands Juristenblad, XLII (1967) 503, which ensured that Sergeant
Meijer’s death sentence was publicised. Also: H.H.A. de Graaff, “Generaal
en krijgsraad te velde in 1940. Een noodzakelijke verduidelijking”, Neder-
lands Juristenblad, XLII (1967) 814-822, and: C.H. Beekhuis (the officer-
secretary of the court martial in question), “Beïnvloeding van leden van
een krijgsraad?”, Nederlands Juristenblad, XLII (1967) 822-824, which
defend the course of events in May 1940. The sentence was criticised by
H.J. Marius Gerlings, “De generaal en de krijgsraad te velde”, Nederlands
Juristenblad, XLII (1967) 1062-1067 (with a ‘postscript’ by Beekhuis) and
by H.M. Voetelink, “Pleidooi voor een sergeant”, Nederlands Juristenblad,

XLIII (1968) 317-323. From a military-legal angle, H.L.M. Kramer wrote
“Het krijgsraadvonnis van 12 mei 1940”, Militair Rechtelijk Tijdschrift, LXI
(1968) 577-586. His argument is, however, clouded by Cold-War thinking.
Anyone wishing to know all there is to know about Sergeant Meijer’s death
sentence should, however, read J.F.A. Boer, De zaak van sergeant Meijer
(Amsterdam, 1970). In this book, the author argues in Meijer’s defence.
On 20 November 1970, the Ministers of Defence and Justice presented
to Parliament a summary of an inquiry they had launched into executions
involving Dutch service personnel in the war days of May 1940: “Onder-
zoek terechtstellingen meidagen 1940”, 20 November 1970, in Handelingen
der Staten Generaal. Zitting 1970-1971. Tweede Kamer. Bijlagen, no. II.038.
This summary was prepared by the lawyer and historian C. Fasseur.
Chapter Nine
There are two parts of the ‘green series’ which deal with the operations by
the Dutch armed forces in the northern provinces: A. van der Wiel, De
territoriale verdediging van de noordelijke provinciën (The Hague, 1952),
and: O.J. Siersema and V.E. Nierstrasz, De Stelling van Den Helder. Mei
1940 (The Hague, 1960). The latter work, written mainly by Nierstrasz,
who kept up a probing correspondence with some of the key players for
the purpose, is more critical of the defenders than the earlier volume. In
his Afsluitdijk 1940 (Baarn, 1977), E.H. Brongers offers more than the title
suggests; he also gives an evocative account of the fighting on 10 May.
Important sources for the operations by the German troops are: “Die
1. Kavallerie-Division im Westen 10.5.40-29.6.40” and the “Erfahrungs-
bericht der 1. Kavallerie-Division über den Einsatz in Holland und Frank-
reich”. Both documents were written after the fighting and can be found in
the Bundesarchiv-Militärarchiv (respectively: BA-MA RH 29-1/54 en BA-
MA RH 29-1/570). If one is willing to put up with the blusterous language,
Leo Leixner, Von Lemberg bis Bordeaux. Fronterlebnisse eines Kriegsberich-
ters (Munich, 1941) provides additional reading. The author followed the
operations of the 1. Kavalleriedivision as a member of a National-Socialist
propaganda company. Useful information about the atmosphere among
and the character of the cavalrymen is offered in F.M. von Senger und Et-
terlin, commander of the Reiterbrigade in May 1940, in: Die 24. Panzer
Division vormals 1. Kavallerie-Division 1939-1945 (Neckargemünd, 1962).
In a pleasant, reliable style, H. Brand describes the fighting around

Coevorden in: Die lange morgen in Mei. 10 mei 1940 (Meppel, 1980). J.
Poortman, Meppel in de meidagen van 1940 (Meppel, 1979) contains lit-
tle information. Not much more information is added by W. Bakker in
his Tussen Duitse cavalerie en Canadese brencarriers. Meppel en omge-
ving in oorlogstijd (Meppel, 1990). A detailed account of the fighting for
the bridges over the Termunterzijldiep is provided by the (unpublished)
paper by J.W. Elsinga, Nieuwolda. 10 mei 1940 (Bergum, 1990). J.P. Koers
also looks at the importance of this waterway in the Tijdschrift van de His-
torische Vereniging Scheemda, no. 14 (1994) 23-24. Franz Lenselink offers
a reliable overview in his Delfzijl 1940-1945. Een terugblik op vijf jaren van
oorlog en bezetting (Bedum, 1995). The first article about the battles in the
border area appeared in 1941: P.H. Pott, “De grensverdediging in onze
Noordelijke Provinciën”, De Militaire Spectator, CX (1941) 452-456.
Dutch historiography has always placed the emphasis on the fight-
ing at Kornwerderzand. An informative article by Lieutenant Q.J. Ham,
deputy detachment commander there in May 1940, was issued under the
title: “De verdedigingswerken aan het Kornwerderzand gedurende de
oorlogsdagen”, De Militaire Spectator, CX (1941) 170-181 and, because it
described the troops retreating from the Wons Position as a “disorderly
mess”, provoked furious reactions among the defenders of that position.
In separate rejoinders, Reserve Major B. Smid and Reserve Captain P.
van der Linden defended their troops against this reproach; these texts
can be found in the article: “De verdediging van den Afsluitdijk”, De Mili-
taire Spectator, CX (1941) 305-317. The extent to which Smid was weighed
down by the (self‑)reproach for not having put up more resistance is
shown by a highly apologetic, anonymous note about him in the archives
of the Netherlands Institute for War Documentation.
Largely responsible for the myth of the ‘Dam of Death’ are O. Ebbens,
who, as a member of the Leeuwarden division of the Voluntary Home
Reserve Corps of the Air Defence Service, served in the anti-aircraft bat-
tery at Kornwerderzand, and the journalist E. Wijga. In their Dodendam.
De strijd voor en op de Afsluitdijk in de Meidagen van 1940 (Amsterdam,
1946), they put the number of attackers at six to eight hundred, of which
about half were supposed to have been killed. A great many authors have—
unfortunately—used this book as a primary source. See for example: D.H.
Couvée, De Meidagen van ’40 (The Hague, 1960), and J.J.C.P Wilson,
Vijf oorlogsdagen en hun twintigjarige voorgeschiedenis (Assen, 1960). H.
Jonkers blended the information available to him into a pleasantly read-
able whole in “De gevechten bij Wons en Kornwerderzand. De slag om de
dodendam” in: A.H. Paape et al., eds, Bericht van de tweede wereldoorlog
(Amsterdam, 1970) 371-372. It was the former Captain I.L. Uijterschout
who came up with the term Totendeich; he was the chief of the army staff
in Fortress Den Helder and in June 1940 he instituted an inquiry into the
German operation. In “De Afsluitdijk en de Stelling van Den Helder 10-
15 mei 1940”, Militaire Spectator, CXLIX (1980) 211-220, the same Uijter-
schout tried to get the genie back into the bottle by explaining that the
German attack on Kornwerderzand had not been a serious, large-scale
action. B.J. Haijer, an orderly, kept a diary of his adventures in the 1st Se-
curity Troops Depot Company during May 1940. His story appeared in
printed form in 1940. Soldaat op de Afsluitdijk (Leeuwarden, 1980).
For the history of the construction, design and arming of the Korn-
werderzand complex, one can best consult: J.R.Verbeek, “Grepen uit de
ontstaansgeschiedenis van de verdedigingswerken van Kornwerderzand”,
Mars et Historia, XXIII-3 (1989) 18-22, or the relevant passages from his
standard book, Kustversterkingen 1900-1940 (Haarlem, 1989).
The deployment of HNLMS Johan Maurits van Nassau is discussed in:
A.N. baron de Vos van Steenwijk, Het marinebeleid in de Tweede Wereld-
oorlog (Amsterdam and Dieren, 1986); Ph.M. Bosscher, De Koninklijke
Marine in de Tweede Wereldoorlog. Deel I. Voorgeschiedenis en de verrich-
tingen in Nederland, de Europese wateren en het noordelijk deel van de At-
lantische Oceaan tot het uitbreken van de oorlog in Azië (december 1941)
(Franeker, 1984), and: J. Nuis, “Hr. Ms. Johan Maurits van Nassau en
Kornwerderzand, 13-14 mei 1940”, Mars et Historia, XXIII-3 (1989) 22-
24. A few salient details are provided by: Artillerie Mededeelingen A. Verslag
van de Artillerie-Verrichtingen aan Boord van Hr. Ms. “Johan Maurits van
Nassau” tusschen 10 en 14 mei 1940, nr. 133 (Batavia, 1941).
The ‘Dam of Death’ myth started to lead a life of its own in many cir-
cles. Although the hundreds of German deaths referred to by Ebbens and
Wijga are increasingly taken with a pinch of salt (Brongers, for example,
claimed in the Bolswards Nieuwsblad in 1980 that the German losses were
mainly wounded personnel), the question of what the 1. Kavalleriedivi-
sion did with the dead and wounded continued to intrigue G.A. Bonte-
koe. His Rondom de Slag om de Afsluitdijk (Leeuwarden, 1980) tries in
particular to make it clear that the Germans attempted to use a brilliant
cover operation to disguise their own failure at the Afsluitdijk; bugles and
mouth organs were apparently played on the numerous (sic!) medical
transports to drown out the moans of the wounded. This bitter little book
shows once again how great the divide between imagination and reality
has become. J.A. Bodewes, in his Buigen en barsten. De oorlog 1940-1945
in Noord-Nederland (Haren, 1991), adopts Bontekoe’s theory without any

reservations whatsoever.
Members of the Kornwerderzand Foundation (www.kazemattenmu-
seum.nl), who also maintain the Kornwerderzand Casemate Museum, be-
gan an oral history project in 1999. Veterans from the Wons Position and
Kornwerderzand were interviewed in this context. Interviews were also
held with veterans of the 1. Kavalleriedivision. The reports are kept in the
museum and can be consulted there.
Chapter Ten
Primary sources which give an account of the fighting on the southern

front of Fortress Holland are available at the Netherlands Institute of Mili-
tary History (NIMH). These describe the operations by the Dutch troops.
There is little material available on the subject of the operations by the
German forces, since most of the war journals and battle reports have
been lost.
The most important book about the history of the fighting on
the southern front of Fortress Holland is M.R.H. Calmeyer and V.E.
Nierstrasz, De krijgsverrichtingen op het Zuidfront van de Vesting Holland.
Mei 1940 (The Hague, 1963). This last part of the ‘green series’ about the
land war is the most readable part of the series, partly because all sorts of
abbreviations that were used earlier for military posts have now been re-
placed by the full name of each of the servicemen in question. A summary
of this part is given by P.G.H. Maalderink in “De open achterpoort van
de Vesting Holland”, Militaire Spectator, CL (1981) 191-220. The myth of
the fifth column is dealt with by L. de Jong in his dissertation entitled De
Duitse vijfde colonne in de Tweede Wereldoorlog (Arnhem, 1953).
E.H. Brongers describes the battles on the southern front of Fortress
Holland in the first and third part of his Opmars naar Rotterdam (Baarn,
1982-1983). The first part is subtitled “De luchtlanding”, the third part “De
laatste fase”. These are Brongers’ most successful books, which, in contrast
to some of his earlier works, give well-considered accounts of the German
operations.
The memoirs of the chief of staff of the Kil Group, Reserve Captain
M.R.H. Calmeyer, were published by J. Hoffenaar under the title Herin-
neringen. Memoires van een christen, militair en politicus (The Hague,
1997). The operations by the Light Division at the bridge over the Noord
at Alblasserdam are described in M.R.H. Calmeyer, “Het gevecht aan
de Noord, 11-14 mei 1940”, De Militaire Spectator, CX (1941) 129-167,
and: A. Korpel, De strijd om de vergeten brug (Alblasserdam, 1980). On

the subject of the Light Division’s I-2 RW, J. Eggens wrote: “I-2 R.W. ge-
durende de oorlogsdagen”, Mavors, XXXV (1941) 321-352. In the com-
memorative book De militaire wielrijders. Het ontstaan van twee roem-
ruchte regimenten (S.1., 1995), L.P.J. Knoops also devotes a great deal of
attention to the deployment of the cyclists.
The events in Dordrecht in May 1940 are described by J.A. van der
Vorm in: Dordt open stad. De meidagen van 1940 in Dordrecht (Dordrecht,
s.a.). Second Lieutenant J.B. Plasschaert committed his experiences to
paper in 1942 in “Een episode uit den strijd om Dordrecht”, De Militaire
Spectator, CXI (1942) 105-115. J. Rinse did the same in “Ervaringen van
een mitrailleur-compagnie (M.C.-II-28 R.I.)”, Mavors, XXXIV (1940) 685-
704. The events in Hook of Holland are recorded in H. Onderwater et al.,
Oorlog rond Hoek van Holland 10-20 mei 1940 (Hook of Holland, 2000).
The fighting in Rotterdam is described in: M.R.H. Calmeyer and
V.E. Nierstrasz, De strijd om Rotterdam. Mei 1940 (The Hague, 1952).
A romanticised but historically reliable report of events is given by A.
Wagenaar in: Rotterdam mei 1940 (Amsterdam, 1963). Particularly ap-
pealing is: K. Mallan, Als de dag van gisteren... De Duitse overrompeling en
vernietiging van Nederlands eerste havenstad. Rotterdam 10-14 mei 1940
(Weesp, 1985). The actions of the Royal Netherlands Navy during the
fighting in Rotterdam are recorded by Bert Honselaar in De zwarte dui-
vels van Rotterdam (Rotterdam, 1948). A number of passages in this book
should, however, be taken with a pinch of salt. A somewhat less felici-
tous attempt to save the naval operations from oblivion is W. Hornman,
De helden van de Willemsbrug. Rotterdam, mei 1940 (Amsterdam, 1984).
More appealing are the recollections of Knight of the Military Order of
William Charles L.J.F. Douw van der Krap, Contra de swastika. De strijd
van een onverzettelijke Nederlandse marineofficier in bezet Europa, 1940-
1945 (Bussum and Antwerp, 1981). For the operations by the Military Air
Arm, one should of course consult F.J. Molenaar, De luchtverdediging mei
1940 (The Hague, 1970). For operations by the British Royal Air Force,
one should read H. Onderwater, En toen was het stil… De luchtoorlog bo-
ven Rotterdam en IJsselmonde 1940-1945 (Baarn, 1981). Private K.Th. de
Graaf of the signal troops recorded his recollections of the fighting in Rot-
terdam in his unpublished diary Hoe we in Rotterdam de oorlog meemaak-
ten (NIMH collection).
Books that were published on the German side about the fighting were: D.
von Choltitz, Soldat unter Soldaten (Konstanz, 1951) and: A. Kesselring,
Soldat bis zum letzten Tag (Bonn, 1953), two books containing recollec-
tions of German officers. Written on the basis of notes left by Kurt Student
was Hermann Götzel, ed., Generaloberst Kurt Student und seine Fall-
schirmjäger. Die Erinnerungen des Generaloberst Kurt Student (Friedburg,
1980). Other German works are: A. von Hove, Achtung Fallschirmjäger.
Eine Idee bricht sich Bahn (Leoni am Starnbergersee, 1954); V. Kühn,
Deutsche Fallschirmjäger im Zweiten Weltkrieg (Stuttgart, 1974); W. Pis-
sin, Der Einsatz der Luftlandetruppen im Westen 1940 (Hamburg, 1958);
C. Bekker, Angriffshöhe 4000. Ein Kriegstagebuch der deutschen Luftwaffe
(Oldenburg, 1964); and: W. Kamman, Die Geschichte des Fallschirmjäger-
Regiment 2, 1939 bis 1945 (Miesbach, 1987). All these books deal with
more than just the German operations in the Netherlands; the Second
World War did, after all, continue after May 1940 for the German soldiers.
The fighting in the Netherlands in May 1940 does not usually feature very
prominently, and it has to be said that the details in the book by A. von
Hove are not reliable. A further reference is R.J. Overy, The Air War, 1939-
1945 (London, 1980).
The lack of sources about the bombing of Rotterdam has encouraged the
wildest speculations to be written on the subject. An attempt to adopt an
academic approach to events was made by H.A. Jacobsen, “Der deutsche
Luftangriff auf Rotterdam. Versuch einer Klärung”, Wehrwissenschaftliche
Rundschau, VIII (1958) 257-284. On this article, see: H.C. Bajetto, “Het
bombardement van Rotterdam”, De Militaire Spectator, CXXVIII (1959)
31-35, and: J.J.C.P. Wilson, “Het bombardement van Rotterdam op 14
mei 1940”, De Militaire Spectator, CXXVIII (1959) 87-92. A reaction to
the opinions of L. de Jong about the bombardment is given by J.W.M.
Schulten in: “L. de Jong en het bombardement van Rotterdam”, Parade,
IV-3 (1983-1984) 2-7. A. Korthals Altes, Luchtgevaar. Luchtaanvallen op
Nederland 1940-1945 (2nd impression., Amsterdam 1984) also covers the
bombardment. An approach from the point of view of international law
is given by L.J. Hartog in: “Het bombardement op Rotterdam op 14 mei
1940”, De Gids, CXXII (1959) 227-250. On this subject, see also: M.W.
Mouton, “Volkenrechtelijke aspecten van het ‘Ultimatum’ aan Rotterdam
op 14 mei 1940”, Militair-Rechtelijk Tijdschrift, LIV (1961) 225-241. M.
Kneepkens, In het rijk van de demonen. Het bombardement van Rotterdam
en de normen (Rotterdam, 1993) and P.W.M. Hasselton, Het bombarde-
ment van Rotterdam 14 mei 1940. Incident of berekening? (Amsterdam,
1999), view the bombardment as a terror bombing. The latter book also
devotes much attention to the role of General Kurt Student and his ‘Nazi
ideology’. A highly speculative work is Loek Elfferich, Eindelijk de waar-
heid nabij. Analyses en emoties naar aanleiding van het bombardement op
Rotterdam (The Hague, 1983).
INDEX
Page numbers in italics refer to illustrations.
Aachen, 177 Arnemuiden, 255

Abbeville, 7, 118, 124 Arnhem, 128, 268, 309
Abrial, J.C., 243 Asperden, 209
Achterberg, 297, 299, 318, 407 Assen, 325, 331
Adam, W.A., 89, 93 Augsburg, 101
Albania, 61 Austria, 14, 24, 26, 28, 60, 412
Albert Canal, 58, 72, 74, 76, 80, 126, 130, Austria-Hungary, 13
135, 140, 141, 143, 151, 156, 158
Alblasserdam, 148, 357, 362, 364, 366, Baaren, K. van de, 329
370, 392 Baarland, 252
Alblasserwaard, 149, 153, 357, 364, 365 Backer, J.D., 388
Allard, A.J.M., 217 Bad Godesberg, 112, 131
Allenstein, 111, 112 Baden, M. von, 13
Almkerk, A. van, 351 Barbas, J.S., 296, 309, 310, 315
Alsace-Lorraine, 16 Barendrecht, 148, 153, 345, 357, 359,
Alting von Geusau, G.A.A., 45 360, 365
Ameland, 322 Barneveld, 286, 308, 310
Amerongen, 307 Barrès, M., 20
Amersfoort, 128, 166, 265, 308 Bath, 247
Amsterdam, 2, 5, 11, 38, 44, 63, 144, 166, Beatrix, Princess, 160
172, 191, 324, 396 Beauchesne, G. de, 229, 239
Andel, J. van, 143, 144, 148, 153, 155, Beaufrère, M.F.G., 243, 248, 256
156, 159, 162, 175, 181, 187, 188, Beck, L., 95, 98, 99, 100, 105
190, 347, 348, 356, 362, 365, 372, Beek, 232
373 Beekhuis, C.H., 284
Andel, J.A.G. van, 345, 361, 367, 372, 376 Beekmans, B., 214
Ankum, 321 Beets, T., 199
Antoni, J.L.H.A., 373 Behschnitt, W., 205
Antwerp, 58, 72, 73, 74, 81, 83, 114, 128, Beijerland, 148
129, 130, 131, 146, 150, 152, 157, Beilen, 325, 327, 331
158, 159, 163, 177, 205, 229, 232, Belfort, 119
239, 245, 247, 256, 259, 382, 402, Belgium, 1, 7, 28, 32, 35, 58, 59, 60, 62,
409 63, 64, 72, 73, 74, 76, 77, 80, 81, 83,
Apeldoorn, 68, 128, 265, 308 112, 114, 116, 117, 118, 119, 121,
Apeldoorn Canal, 142, 148, 151, 155, 271 124, 125, 133, 134, 143, 146, 151,
Apeldoorn, J.B. van, 284, 285, 305 152, 156, 170, 201, 208, 212, 239,
Apell, W. von, 245 257, 258, 259, 386, 397, 404, 406,
Ardennes, 28, 30, 32, 58, 83, 113, 117, 414, 415, 416
118, 119, 121, 125, 397, 403 Berchtesgaden, 30
Arlon, 115, 118 Berg, 210
450 index
Berg, J. van den, 305 Bremen, 162

Bergen op Zoom, 247 Breskens, 255
Bergsche Maas, 80 Breslau, 208
Berlin, 22, 77, 90, 98, 111, 117, 132, 134 Brest-Litovsk, 14, 109, 111
Bernhard, Prince, 49, 57, 160, 163, 256 Briel, P.J. van den, 296
Best, P.W., 56, 85, 142, 144, 182, 301, 376 Brittijn, P.F., 302, 304
Betuwe, 85, 155 Broecke, C.M. van den, 255
Beus, B. de, 301 Broekhuizen, 215
Bijkerk, R.P.F., 413 Broekman, J.M., 348
Bijl, H.C. van der, 145, 148, 149, 152, Brongers, E.H., 201, 389
153, 159, 168, 362, 364, 365, 367, Bronkhorst, 270
370, 372, 373, 375, 392 Bruins, J.H.W., 241, 242, 243, 247, 248,
Bijlsma, G.J., 277 254
Bik, F.C., 301 Brussels, 72, 73, 74, 80, 83, 114
Bilotte, G.H., 81 Buiskooldiep, 327
Bischoff van Heemskerck, W.F.K., 188 Buurman, H.D., 190, 192
Bisschof, 112
Blanchard, G.M.J., 83 Caen, 238
Bleeker, G., 221 Canal from Ghent to Terneuzen, 256
Blerick, 215 Canaris, W., 208
Bleskensgraaf, 367, 370 Carstens, N.T., 144, 168, 187, 188, 192,
Blom, B.L.A., 279, 280 196, 198
Blomberg, W. von, 26, 93, 103, 105 Châlons sur Marne, 119
Boässon, M.W., 221 Chamberlain, N., 27, 28, 30, 32
Bock, F. von, 12, 97, 108, 109, 111, 112, Channel coast, 7, 114, 117, 118, 119
114, 116, 125, 126, 129, 130, 131, Charleroi, 114, 124
132, 134, 136, 139, 140, 141, 150, Choltitz, D. von, 355, 356, 380
151, 152, 157, 158, 159, 163, 166, Chotzen, Th.M., 304
170, 171, 176, 177, 245, 382, 385, Claesen, J.A., 309
397, 402, 403 Clasener, J.C.A., 185
Bodaan, A.H., 354 Clemenceau, G., 16
Boer, J. de, 368 Coevorden, 325, 328, 329
Boers, C.F.J., 335, 336, 338, 339, 341, 342, Colijn, H., 39, 41, 44, 45, 54, 68
406 Collette, R.E.J., 286, 288
Boom, P. van den, 304 Cools, J.P.L., 184
Boompjes, 355, 380 Copenhagen, 84
Bornstedt, von, 224, 225 Corap, A.G., 83
Borssele, 254 Coventry, 7
Bosch, F.J.L. in den, 304 Cramer, J.J.N., 190, 191
Bosch, W.J.C. van den, 361 Crete, 9, 398
Boxmeer, 214 Czechoslovakia, 14, 18, 26, 28, 30, 32, 33,
Boxtel, 217 106, 412, 414
Brandenburg, 208
Brandis, Freiherr C. von, 351 Daladier, E., 30
Brauchitsch, W. von, 26, 107, 109, 111, Damstede, G., 196, 400
114, 151, 152, 158, 163, 171, 245, Danzig, 16, 23, 31, 33, 109, 134
322, 385 Dario, P.E.A., 232, 358
Bräuer, B.O., 344, 351, 353, 371, 372, 374 Davidson, C.M.R., 375
Breda, 74, 76, 83, 84, 129, 130, 142, 149, Dawes, C.G., 18
150, 152, 157, 163, 181, 205, 207, Defence Canal, 207, 219
229, 234, 237, 239, 240, 245, 256, Dekker, W.C.H., 375
258, 343, 358, 382, 402, 404 Dekkershoekje, 196
Breda, J.C. van, 247 Delft, 174, 182, 184, 188, 190, 196, 199
index 451
Delmenhorst, 386 Eifel, 134

Den Dungen, 232, 234 Eindhoven, 77, 221, 236
Den Helder, 60, 86, 331, 336, 339, 341, Einstmann, 212
342 Elst, 305, 307
Den Oever, 324 Emmen, 325
Denmark, 84, 112, 181, 201, 348, 397, Emmer-Compascuum, 325, 328
415 Emmikhuizer Berg, 309
Deslaurens, M., 228, 243, 248, 250, 252, Ems, 327
253, 255, 256, 259 England, 134, 163, 201, 217, 398
Dessau, 101 Enkhuizen, 128
Detmar, J., 217, 222 Erp, 236
Deventer, 126, 269, 270, 271 Erp, J.C.C. van, 295
Didam, 268 Esschen, 245
Diepenbrugge, J.J. van, 367, 368, 370, Esschert, G., 275
373, 375 Ethiopia, 24
Diepenrijckx, P.J., 81 Euskirchen, 134, 152
Dietrich, J., 96, 109, 270, 271, 382
Dijk, J.J.C. van, 46, 47, 50, 66, 77 Fagalde, M.B.A., 228
Dijxhoorn, A.Q.H., 64, 66, 76, 77, 81, Falkenburg, L., 364
86, 169 Feith, M.P., 195
Dinant, 77, 124, 146 Feldt, K., 321, 324, 325, 331, 336, 342
Dinther, 228 Fiévez, A.H.J.L., 43, 297
Döbken, E.G., 234 Flanders, 58, 81, 83, 114, 118, 121, 125,
Doesburg, 267, 270 130, 156, 259, 397
Dollard, 327 Flushing, 149, 243, 255, 386
Doorn, 282, 295, 316 Foch, F., 18
Doove Balg, 339 France, 3, 7, 10, 13, 14, 15, 16, 18, 19, 24,
Dordrecht, 9, 83, 126, 131, 142, 144, 146, 25, 26, 28, 30, 32, 37, 38, 39, 41, 42,
153, 159, 181, 199, 205, 229, 343, 54, 58, 59, 60, 64, 68, 73, 74, 76, 80,
344, 345, 347, 348, 350, 351, 356, 83, 89, 106, 111, 112, 113, 114, 116,
357, 361, 362, 364, 366, 367, 368, 117, 118, 120, 121, 122, 134, 143,
369, 370, 372, 373, 375, 378, 383, 146, 170, 201, 257, 382, 397, 403,
387, 392, 397 404, 406, 414, 415, 416
Dordtsche Kil, 351, 361, 368, 375 Frankfurt am Main, 112
Drenthe, 85, 321, 327, 330, 331 Frederick the Great, 69
Driebergen, 316 Friedrichshafen, 101
Drievliet, 188 Frieser, Karl-Heinz, 9
Drift, P.L.R. van der, 242, 251, 254 Friesland, 86, 322, 325
Dubbeldam, 373 Frijtag Drabbe, H.F.J.M.A. von, 348
Dunk, H.W. von der, 37 Fritsch, W. Freiherr von, 26, 99, 105
Dunkirk, 81, 385 Fritschi, A.Th., 338
Durand, P.S., 243, 248, 250, 258, 259 Furstner, J.Th., 143, 168, 169, 173, 379
Dürst Britt, H.J.J.W., 191
Düsseldorf, 139, 150, 157, 163, 170, 177 Gaillard, P.J., 355
Dwars, J., 267, 326 Gamelin, M., 73, 74, 81, 83, 84, 121, 126,
Dyle, 74, 146 146, 149, 239, 416
Ganzendijk, 329
East Prussia, 108, 109, 111, 321 Geel, G., 293
Eben Emael, 126, 130, 139, 141, 151, 158, Geer, jonkheer D.J. de, 64, 77
397 Geertruidenberg, 157
Echten, 330 Gelderland, 267
Ede, 48, 128, 265, 309, 319 Gelderman, G.J.W., 292, 305, 307
Eendracht, 254 Gelderse Vallei, 64, 68, 69, 71, 78, 261,
452 index
262, 264, 273 120, 121, 122, 124, 125

Gennep, 129, 139, 141, 142, 144, 150, Guihard, 248, 250, 252
209, 210, 212, 214, 215, 217, 219, Gunters, H.A., 193, 195
222, 224, 227, 258
Gennep, R.C. van, 365, 367 Haagsche Schouw, 185, 187, 191
Gey van Pittius, A.R.W., 254 Haamstede, 243
Ghent, 73, 130, 397 Haarlem, 53, 68, 144, 402
Giraud, H.H., 81, 83, 146, 149, 170, 228, Haas, A. de, 274, 275
229, 239, 245 Habsburg Empire, 14
Givet, 74, 81 Hague, The, 7, 9, 42, 63, 81, 85, 86, 126,
Gleiwitz, 33 131, 140, 142, 143, 144, 148, 151,
Goch, 209 152, 155, 156, 159, 162, 166, 167,
Goes, 243, 250, 252, 254 168, 171, 174, 176, 177, 179, 181,
Goirle, 73, 155, 258 182, 184, 187, 188, 190, 191, 193,
Gooium, 333 194, 195, 196, 198, 201, 202, 203,
Goossens, P.F., 250 343, 348, 357, 397, 398, 400, 402,
Gorinchem, 362 404, 407
Göring, H., 24, 26, 101, 103, 131, 345, Hajum, 333
383, 385, 386, 388, 389, 390, 397, Halder, F., 105, 109, 111, 112, 113, 114,
403 116, 117, 118, 119, 120, 121, 122,
Gort, Lord J.S.S.P.V., 83 124, 125, 129, 141, 152, 157, 158,
Gorter, W. 369 163, 382, 385, 409
Gouda, 166, 313 Hansen, C., 261, 271, 286, 308
Gouda, G.J., 277, 280 Hansweert, 240, 251
Govers, A., 212 Harberts, J., 282, 283, 284, 285, 293, 295,
Grave, 129, 142, 150, 207, 209, 210, 212 296, 297, 299, 302, 307, 313, 315,
’s‑Gravendeel, 351, 361, 365 319, 407
Great Britain, 3, 13, 14, 16, 19, 24, 26, 28, Hardeman, J.C., 229
30, 32, 37, 39, 58, 59, 64, 68, 76, 80, Hardenberg, 325
103, 106, 111, 112, 113, 117, 143, Haringvliet, 63
146, 168, 170, 175, 382, 398, 406, Harlingen, 325
414, 415, 416 Hasse, W., 166
Grebbe, see also Grift, 277, 284 Hasselt, 221
Grebbeberg, 6, 155, 157, 161, 162, 169, Hatert, 209
177, 202, 261, 265, 272, 274, 277, Haußer, P., 207, 245, 246
281, 282, 284, 285, 286, 288, 290, Hautecler, G., 229
292, 293, 295, 296, 299, 301, 302, Heemskerk, J.W., 354
305, 306, 307, 308, 309, 310, 312, Heer, H.P. de, 256
313, 314, 316, 317, 318, 318, 319, Heerjansdam, 360, 375
396, 400, 402, 405, 406, 407, 408, Heeswijk, 228, 232, 234
417 Heijnen, C.F., 268
Greter, J., 293 Heinenoord, 359
Griendtsveen, 207 Heinrich, 264, 265
Grift, 71, 288, 289, 299, 318 Helmer, R., 247
Groenendijk, W.A., 327 Helmond, 221, 228, 236
Groener, W., 95 Hendriksz, J.F.W., 358, 359
Groenewoud, S.L., 220 Hennink, W.F., 272, 285, 295, 297, 305
Groep, de, 310 Hertel, 224, 225
Groningen, 85, 321, 322, 324, 325, 327, ’s-Hertogenbosch, 73, 85, 129, 144, 155,
329, 331 228, 233
Groot, H. de, 250, 251 Heumen, 209, 212
Grubbenvorst, 214, 215 Heye, W., 92
Guderian, H., 99, 109, 111, 114, 118, 119, Hillegersberg, 148
index 453
Hilvarenbeek, 155 407

Himmler, H., 96, 97 Jager, F.P. de, 348, 350
Hindenburg, P. von, 15, 23, 98 Japan, 28, 30, 41
Hitler, A., 14, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 28, Jena, 164
30, 31, 32, 33, 44, 54, 90, 95, 96, 97, Jodl, A., 122
98, 99, 101, 105, 106, 108, 109, 111, Jolles, H., 331, 332, 335, 338, 339, 341
112, 113, 114, 115, 116, 117, 120, Jong, B. de, 333
121, 122, 124, 130, 132, 134, 142, Jong, L. de, 6, 202, 412
152, 171, 205, 208, 378, 383, 385, Jordaan, L.J., 2
386, 390, 396, 398, 403, 411, 416 Juliana Canal, 139, 210
Hoedekenskerke, 252 Juliana, Princess, 160, 163
Hoekse Waard, 146, 359
Hoepner, E., 163 Kaasgat, 241, 250, 251
Hoffman von Waldau, O., 383 Kalma, J., 338
Hohendorff, 191 Kanne, 140
Höhne, O., 386, 388, 390 Kapelle, 252, 257
Hollands Diep, 63, 74, 149, 205, 257, 343, Karnebeek, jonkheer H.A. van, 15, 41
345, 347, 348, 351, 356, 378, 409 Kassel, 90
Hoogerheide, 245 Katwijk, 187, 190
Hoogeveen, 325 Katwijk aan de Maas, 209
Hoogeveense Vaart, 326 Katwijk aan den Rijn, 185, 190
Hoogstraten, 239 Katwijk aan Zee, 185, 190, 199
Hook of Holland, 68, 149, 167, 169, 378, Kauffmann, A., 205, 224
380 Keitel, W., 26, 113, 120
Hoorn, 323 Keizersveer, 245
Hout, 221 Kenninck, W.J., 199
Houwen, J. van der, 351 Keppler, G., 261, 267, 274, 281, 285, 289
Hubicki, A. Ritter von, 205, 232, 382 Kerfin, H., 354, 356, 378
Hungary, 14 Kesselring, A., 103, 109, 126, 131, 136,
Huntziger, C., 83 151, 163, 164, 198, 386, 390, 403
Kesteren, M.G. van, 195
Idenburg, A.W.F., 52 Kiel, 13
IJmuiden, 149, 163, 165, 201 Kiewitz, W., 131
IJssel, 51, 55, 64, 68, 69, 80, 86, 126, 142, Kinderdijk, 365
148, 151, 265, 267, 268, 269, 270, Kleef, 245
271, 286, 400, 404, 405, 406 Kleffens, E.N. van, 62, 81
IJsselmeer, 63, 128, 162, 321, 323, 324, Kleinheisterkamp, M., 252
325, 326, 335, 336 Klemm, K., 316
IJsselmeer Dam, 6, 63, 162, 169, 321, Klomp, de, 309, 312, 319
323, 324, 325, 330, 331, 332, 335, Kloosterhaar, 324
336, 337, 338, 339, 405 Kloppenburg, H.C., 368
IJsselmonde, 148, 357, 362 Kluge, G. von, 112, 114
IJzereef, W.J.H., 338 Klundert, 156
India, 30 Knauss, R., 101
Irene, Princess, 160 Kneepkens, M., 389
Ironside, E., 30 Koblenz, 119, 122
Island of Dordrecht, 153, 159, 168, 351, Köhler, H., 209
361, 365, 367, 368, 370, 372, 373, Könning, A.H., 277
375, 376, 377, 392, 406 Kornwerd, 335
Italy, 14, 19, 20, 24, 26, 28, 30, 33, 34, 61 Kornwerderzand, 63, 169, 171, 324, 331,
335, 336, 338, 339, 341, 342, 405,
Jaarsveld, 315 406
Jacometti, J.H.A., 272, 290, 291, 305, 319, Korthals Altes, A., 389
454 index
Koster, H.P., 351 Linge, 155

Koster, T., 268 Lingen, 325
Kraak, L.H., 188 Lloyd George, D., 16
Krämer, H.F.L., 241, 251 London, 7, 13, 30, 32, 41, 60, 72, 80, 117,
Kreekrak Dam, 243 156, 160, 256, 395, 404
Kreysing, H., 345, 357 Loon op Zand, 157, 239
Kriebel, R., 264, 265 Loon, A.A.M. van, 282, 284, 295, 296,
Krispijn, 351, 370, 373 297, 299, 305, 307, 313
Kruijff, V. de, 236 Loosduinen, 187, 193, 196, 199
Kruithof, A.J., 376 Lorraine, 119, 124
Küchler, G.K.F.W. von, 12, 109, 126, 128, Louvain, 74, 81, 83, 146, 245
129, 132, 139, 140, 141, 142, 150, Lower Rhine, 316
152, 157, 158, 164, 166, 171, 176, Ludendorff, E., 13, 16
176, 177, 245, 261, 308, 322, 339, Lunteren, 308, 310
382, 383, 389, 402, 403 Luntersche Beek, 310
Kumm, O., 306 Lutterhoofdwijk Canal, 329, 400
Kuyk, L.C.A. van, 234 Lutz, O., 99
Luxembourg, 28, 112, 113, 118, 119
La Ferté-sur-Chiers, 28, 83
Lackner, W., 386, 388, 390 Maaldrift, 191
Lage Zwaluwe, 348, 350 Maas, 55, 60, 63, 64, 71, 76, 80, 83, 86,
Lagepeel, 222 113, 129, 139, 140, 141, 142, 143,
Land van Maas en Waal, 84, 155, 296, 318 144, 148, 149, 150, 155, 158, 161,
Land, G., 297, 299, 302 162, 163, 168, 173, 176, 206, 207,
Landzaat, W.P., 272, 286, 288, 302, 304 208, 209, 209, 211, 214, 215, 222,
Langbehn, J., 20 224, 229, 257, 259, 354, 355, 356,
Langenboom, 217, 222 359, 378, 379, 380, 383, 388, 393,
Langstraat, 162, 245 400, 405, 406
Larive, E.H., 379 Maas, F.N., 350
Le Bon, G., 20 Maasbracht, 215
Le Fèvre de Montigny, G.J., 297 Maasmechelen, 77, 117, 121
Leeb, W. Ritter von, 108, 112 Maastricht, 60, 63, 113, 122, 127, 134,
Leeuwarden, 325 140, 141, 151, 152, 158, 211, 212,
Leiden, 166, 196 223, 239, 240
Leiderdorp, 199 Maas-Waal Canal, 55, 209, 210, 212
Leidschendam, 188 Maduro, G.J.L., 188, 190
Leipzig, 164 Makkum, 331, 333, 335
Lek, 155 Malden, 209, 212
Lemm, D., 350 Malines, 245
Lemmer, 331, 340 Mallinckrodt, J., 190
Lenin, V.I., 14 Manders, G.J.A., 360, 375
Leopold Canal, 257 Manning, A.F., 19
Lestoquoi, 229 Manstein, E. von, 117, 118, 119, 120, 121,
Lewis, R.B., 301 122, 124, 125
Liège, 58, 72, 74, 113, 114, 115, 116, 122, Mantel, W., 353
124, 126, 140, 158, 163 Mantey, 265
Lier, W. van, 378 Marcks, E., 150, 151, 157, 166, 171
Lille, 81, 83 Marees van Swinderen, jonkheer
Limburg, 39, 51, 63, 68, 72, 74, 86, 135, S.M.S.A.A. de, 296, 305
205, 208, 209, 210, 212, 257 Marijnen, J.A.C.J., 347, 348, 350
Lind, A.A., 335 Marijs, C.A.J., 372
Lindeman, D.H., 277, 279 Mark, 239, 359
Linden, P. van der, 335 Mark, G. van der, 372
index 455
Mars, C., 333, 335 245, 397

Marx, W., 92 Neidholdt, F., 299
Mathon, A.J.E., 221, 222 Netherlands East Indies, 3, 41, 52, 56
Maubeuge, 83 Netze, A., 217
Medemblik, 323 Neurath, C. von, 26
Meer en Bosch, 193, 195, 196 Neut, J.C. van der, 279
Meijer, J.C., 293, 295, 319 Niers, 210
Meijerink, L., 280 Nierstrasz, V.E., 43
Meppel, 325, 330 Nietzsche, F., 20
Merwede, 362, 365, 375, 376, 379 Nieuwe Maas, 177, 344, 345, 353, 356,
Meuse, see also Maas, 7, 58, 74, 83, 114, 379, 392
115, 118, 119, 121, 124, 125, 146, Nieuwe Merwede, 351
171, 382, 397 Nieuwe Waterweg, 378, 379
Michon, G., 247, 358, 359 Nieuwersluis, 283
Middelburg, 148, 162, 242, 243, 248, 250, Nieuweschans, 324, 327, 341
254, 255, 386 Nieuw-Milligen, 48
Middelrode, 228, 232 Nieuwolda, 330
Migchelbrink, G., 280, 400 Nijland, J.C.C., 296, 307
Mijsberg, H., 364, 367, 373 Nijmegen, 215
Milch, E., 101 Nijnatten, A.A. van, 144, 145, 221, 227
Mill, 140, 141, 144, 149, 150, 207, 215, Noomen, P., 353
217, 218, 219, 220, 221, 222, 224, Noord, 148, 149, 152, 357, 362, 364, 365,
225, 227, 228, 257, 258, 411 367, 370, 376, 392
Mittlach, 112 Noord-Brabant, 38, 39, 51, 58, 59, 63, 68,
Moerdijk, 126, 144, 146, 149, 152, 156, 69, 72, 73, 74, 76, 80, 81, 83, 84, 85,
157, 159, 162, 181, 199, 205, 232, 116, 129, 130, 143, 144, 146, 148,
240, 323, 343, 344, 344, 347, 349, 152, 155, 156, 157, 158, 162, 170,
358, 374, 376, 392, 397 205, 207, 208, 212, 217, 221, 222,
Molenaar, F.J., 201 228, 229, 237, 240, 244, 245, 257,
Molenaarsgraaf, 362 258, 310, 343, 345, 347, 357, 358,
Moltke, H. von, 69 359, 362, 397, 404, 409, 410, 416
Monster, 195 Noordenbos, U.C.C., 241, 251
Monthermé, 397 Noordereiland, 355, 356, 357, 378, 386,
Mook, 129, 142, 150, 216 387, 388
Morzik, F., 345 Noord-Holland, 162
Mosca, G., 20 Noordwijk, 190, 196
Moselle, 77 North Sea, 59, 62, 77, 168, 410
Mulder, B., 270 Norway, 84, 85, 112, 181, 201, 348
Mulder, C.H., 247 Noster, 182
Mulder, H., 191 Nuremberg, 22, 25, 401
Mulder, H.J., 220
Müller, S., 274 Obbicht, 210
Munich, 30, 32, 61 Ochten aan de Waal, 313
Münster, 386 Ockenburg, airfield, 142, 149, 179, 181,
Mussert, J.A., 209, 347, 367, 372, 373, 182, 184, 185, 186, 187, 188, 189,
375, 376, 392 193, 195, 196, 197, 198, 201, 202,
Mussolini, B., 20, 24, 30 203, 400
Oesterreich, C. von, 310, 312, 316, 319
Naaldwijk, 188 Offringa, J., 373
Naarden, 79 Oome, C.M., 357
Nahuijsen, H., 277, 279 Oostburg, 256
Namen, J.G. van, 369 Oosterdiep, 326
Namur, 74, 81, 83, 114, 122, 130, 146, Oosterhesselen, 326, 330
456 index
Oosterhout, 229 Raeder, E., 26

Oosterschelde, 248, 259 Ravelli, D.P., 361
Oostmalle, 232 Ravenstein, 142, 150
Opheusden, 279 Reichenau, W. von, 108, 112, 114, 126,
Oranje Canal, 326 132, 141, 151, 158, 208
Oslo, 84 Reijers, A.G.C., 359
Ostend, 256 Reijnders, I.H., 54, 55, 62, 66, 68, 69, 71,
Oude Maas, 205, 343, 344, 351, 353, 356, 72, 73, 74, 76, 77, 78, 80, 406
357, 359, 360, 361, 362, 368, 392 Reinhardt, W., 91
Oude Rijn, 191 Renswoude, 308
Oudenaarde, 73 Rheims, 81, 119
Overijssel, 86, 267, 268, 321, 326 Rhenen, 65, 164, 167, 169, 265, 270, 274,
Overschie, 155, 173, 190, 196, 198, 199, 281, 288, 291, 292, 296, 299, 301,
201, 202 302, 303, 304, 307, 313, 315
Overstraeten, R. van, 80, 81, 83, 258 Rhijn, J. van, 355
Rhine, 9, 25, 63, 108, 207, 279, 284, 304,
Palestine, 30 305
Palm, P.J.H. van der, 50 Rhineland, 16, 18, 19, 25, 26, 32, 73, 99,
Papendrecht, 364, 367, 373 209
Pareto, V., 20 Ribbentrop, J. von, 26
Paris, 16, 18, 60, 72, 73, 80, 117, 146, 149, Ridder, J.F. de, 296
397, 414, 416 Ridderkerk, 378
Paulus, F., 108 Riggeling, J., 280
Peel, 57, 63, 64, 129, 207, 237 Rijhiner, H.D., 199
Peeters, A.W.J., 212 Rijnzicht, 274, 277
Pernis, 163 Rijsoord, 164, 170, 175, 176, 176, 177,
Pétain, H., 15 357, 366, 382
Picard, F., 228, 232 Rijswijk, 182, 184, 188
Pijnacker, 199 Rilland, 247
Pingjum, 335 Röell, W., 68
Pinke, A.S., 379 Roelofsen, J.C., 66
Plasschaert, J.B., 357, 375 Rohde, 254
Plassche, J.G.M. van der, 86 Röhm, E., 23, 96
Platon, C.J.G., 248 Romania, 18, 32
Plugge, J.J., 283, 293 Rooijen, J.M.A.F. van, 214
Poeldijk, 195, 196 Roosendaal, 163, 229, 232, 239
Poland, 14, 16, 18, 23, 28, 32, 33, 89, 93, Roosteren, 210
106, 108, 109, 111, 113, 116, 128, Rosmalen, 216, 235
131, 321, 396, 403, 410, 412, 414 Rotterdam, 7, 8, 9, 63, 126, 130, 131, 140,
Polder, de, 351 142, 143, 144, 146, 148, 149, 152,
Pomerania, 109 154, 155, 156, 158, 159, 161, 162,
Pop, W.F., 45, 46 163, 164, 166, 168, 170, 171, 173,
Populier, W.F.M., 347, 350, 351 174, 175, 176, 177, 181, 198, 199,
Postma, A.F., 301 201, 205, 245, 323, 343, 344, 345,
Postma, S.J., 301 347, 348, 353, 354, 355, 355, 356,
Präger, F., 348 357, 362, 371, 378, 379, 380, 382,
Prague, 29 383, 384, 385, 386, 388, 389, 390,
Princenhage, 239 391, 392, 393, 395, 397, 401, 402,
Pronk, W., 338 403, 409, 411
Puttershoek, 345, 359 Rozenburg, 380
Putzier, R., 131, 132, 358, 359, 383, 386 Ruhr area, 18, 25, 32, 59, 113, 116, 133,
134
Quackenbrück, 386 Rundstedt, G. von, 108, 109, 118, 119, 403
index 457
Russia, 13, 14 Sodenstern, G. von, 120, 124

Ruys de Beerenbrouck, jonkheer C.J.M., 45 Someren, 236
Somme, 118, 119, 124
Saarland, 16, 98 Sonne, J.H., 327
Salmuth, H. von, 158, 166 Soviet Union, 9, 14, 16, 18, 19, 24, 33, 91,
Sandijck, J.H.W., 279 106, 108, 111, 398
Sankt Goar, 112 Spek, F.R. van der, 291
Sas, G.J., 77, 85, 86 Spijkenisse, 357
Schacht, H., 24 Sponeck, H. Graf von, 186, 245
Scharroo, P.W., 159, 161, 163, 168, 173, Sponeck, H.E.O. Graf von, 131, 132, 139,
174, 199, 347, 379, 380, 387, 388, 140, 179, 184, 185, 187, 195, 198,
391 199, 383, 403
Scheldt, 73, 146, 158, 229, 245, 259 St Agatha, 215
Scheldt estuary, 74 St Hubert, 222
Schenk, R., 209, 219, 220, 221 St Oedenrode, 236
Scherpenhuijzen, H.D., 199 Stad, H.J. van der, 148, 156, 162, 240,
Scherpenzeel, 169, 308, 310, 311, 312, 242, 243, 254, 256, 259
315, 319, 406 Stavenisse, 254
Scheveningen, 82 Staveren, J. van, 378
Schiedam, 378 Stavoren, 331, 336
Schiermonnikoog, 322 Steenbergen, H.J.M., 291
Schiphol, 5, 84, 144 Steenwijk, 331
Schipluiden, 199 Stein, 210
Schmidt Crans, H.M., 301 Stein, W., 322, 331
Schmidt, L.J., 146, 149, 155, 156, 162, Steiner, F., 97, 250
208, 221, 227, 229, 232, 234, 237, Stettin, 120
239, 240, 258, 378, 382, 383, 385, Student, K., 128, 131, 132, 139, 158, 159,
388, 389, 411 164, 187, 232, 343, 344, 353, 354,
Schmidt, R.F.K., 152, 158, 163, 164 356, 357, 364, 368, 383, 386, 392
Schmundt, R., 122 Sudetenland, 29, 30
Scholz, F. von, 286 Suez Canal, 30
Schotman, H., 299 Swagerman, B., 195, 378
Schouten, A.M., 215 Sweden, 91, 112
Schouwen-Duiveland, 243, 253, 254 Switzerland, 83
Schuiling, W., 380
Schulz, K.L., 353 Tack, J., 279, 282, 284, 293
Schuschnigg, K. von, 26, 28 Terheijden, 239
Sciard, T.M., 228 Termunterzijldiep, 326
Sedan, 7, 28, 83, 115, 118, 119, 121, 122, Terschelling, 322
124, 125, 171, 259, 382, 397, 403 Themann, G.E.A., 244
Seeckt, H. von, 91, 92 Tholen, 242, 243, 253, 257, 259
Senger und Etterlin, F.M. von, 325 Tholseindsche Dyke, 241, 249, 250
Seyffardt, H.A., 50, 51, 54 Tiedeman, K. von, 265, 274, 286, 299,
Seyffart, C.F.H., 268 310, 315, 316
Siegmund, H.J., 351 Tilburg, 73, 74, 76, 80, 83, 149, 155, 177,
Silicia, 16, 33 227, 228, 229, 232, 237, 238, 239,
Sissingh, J.G., 376 258, 343
Sleegers, C.J.H., 214 Tirpitz, A. von, 101
Sleen, 325, 330 Toelen, J.F.C., 288
Sliedrecht, 373, 376 Tongeren, 151, 152, 158, 170, 239, 240
Sloe Dam, 252, 253, 254, 255, 257 Tournai, 73
Slovakia, 32, 108 Trettner, H., 356
Smid, B., 330, 332, 333, 335 Triebel, F.G., 241, 247, 248
458 index
Tromp, H.J., 270 Vos, A.J.R. de, 354

Turnhout, 80, 83, 155, 228, 232 Vos, H.H.C., 277
Tweede Tol, 165, 351, 370, 371, 373, 374, Vries, 327
377 Vrolijk, Th.C., 299, 302
Twenthe Canal, 266, 271 Vroome, M.H. de, 330
Vught, 221
Uden, 150, 157, 170, 171, 176
Udet, E., 103 Waal, 63, 83, 149, 155, 313
Uijterschout, I.L., 339 Waalhaven, 84, 85, 142, 144, 148, 149,
Ulvenhout, 239 152, 153, 155, 156, 159, 344, 345,
United Kingdom, 16, 201 348, 353, 354, 355, 356, 357, 359,
United States, 14, 16, 18 362, 365, 367, 397, 409
Urmond, 210 Waalhaven airfield, 352
Utrecht, 53, 63, 128, 164, 166, 171, 174, Waalwijk, 80
175, 176, 177, 309, 315, 401, 409 Wäckerle, H., 277, 291, 292, 305, 310,
319
Valenciennes, 73, 83 Wageningen, 148, 155, 265, 271, 274,
Valkenburg, 185, 191, 192 281, 284, 286, 288, 291, 301, 302,
Valkenburg, air base, 84, 142, 149, 179, 304, 311
181, 182, 185, 188, 190, 192, 198, Walcheren, 74, 148, 240, 241, 243, 248,
200, 202, 203 250, 252, 253, 254, 255, 256, 259
Valkenswaard, 236 Wall Bake, R.J.W.C. van den, 284
Veenbaas, J., 325, 326, 327, 329, 330 Walther, W., 209, 210
Veenendaal, 309 Warnaars, F.H., 184
Veghel, 234, 235, 236 Warnemünde, 101
Velden, M. van, 219, 225 Warsaw, 7, 108, 109, 111, 174
Velp, 286 Wassenaar, 85, 181, 185, 190
Veluwe, 69, 155, 158, 274, 409 Wassenaarse Slag, 192
Venlo, 78 Wateringen, 198, 199
Versteegen, J.J., 199 Wavre, 74, 83
Vienna, 24, 96 Weber, F., 222, 224, 225, 227
Vis, G.J., 338 Weimar Republic, 14, 16, 19, 21, 33, 89,
Visser, J.K. de, 188 93
Vistula, 109, 111 Wemeldinge, 251
Vlaardingen, 379 Werf, J. van der, 301
Vlieland, 322 Wesel, 139, 150, 157, 163
Vlierden, A. van, 357 Wessem, 214, 215
Vliet, 182, 188 West Friesland, 324, 331, 336
Voigt, C.J., 272, 274, 277, 279, 280, 281, West Frisian Islands, 116, 322
282 Westdijk, A.N., 250
Volkel, 150 Westervoort, 267, 269, 271, 396
Voorburg, 188 Westland, 198
Voorst Evekink, D. van, 73, 74, 80, 81, Wever, W., 101, 103
83, 84, 146 Wiardi Beckman, H.B., 44
Voorst tot Voorst, C.E.W. baron van, 174 Wieldrecht, 153, 159, 347, 350, 361, 365,
Voorst tot Voorst, H.F.M. baron van, 57, 368, 372, 373, 375
77, 143, 143, 380 Wietersheim, G. von, 121
Voorst tot Voorst, J.J.G. baron van, 43, Wijk bij Duurstede, 155, 316
68, 69, 71, 73, 75, 76, 78, 80, 82, Wilhelm II, Kaiser, 13, 14
143, 156, 157, 169, 173, 175, 203, Wilhelmina bridge, 223
258, 272, 283, 296, 297, 301, 313, Wilhelmina Canal, 51, 229, 232, 238
319, 406, 407 Wilhelmina, Queen, 4, 44, 53, 62, 76,
Vorrink, K., 44 131, 163, 166, 169, 173, 179, 409
index 459
Willems bridge, 355, 380 Zech, J. Graf von, 62

Willemsdorp, 350, 351, 373 Zee, K. van der, 379
Willemstad, 156, 358, 359 Zeeland, 39, 51, 61, 63, 68, 72, 74, 80, 83,
William I, King, 1 86, 128, 130, 146, 148, 152, 156,
William II, King, 38 158, 162, 163, 170, 171, 175, 177,
William III, Stadholder, 69 205, 219, 239, 240, 241, 242, 243,
Wilson, J.J.C.P., 146, 161, 173, 174, 229, 244, 248, 254, 256, 257, 258, 259,
380, 387, 389 409, 410
Wilson, W., 13, 16 Zeeuws-Vlaanderen, 148, 170, 240, 243,
Winkelman, H.G., 4, 7, 77, 78, 80, 81, 83, 248, 255, 256, 257, 399
84, 85, 86, 143, 143, 144, 146, 148, Zeist, 143, 296, 308, 316
149, 152, 154, 155, 156, 159, 161, Zevenbergschen Hoek, 358, 392
161, 162, 163, 164, 166, 167, 168, Zickwolff, F., 265, 270, 271, 308, 310,
169, 170, 171, 173, 174, 175, 176, 312, 315
177, 181, 182, 188, 199, 207, 212, Zierikzee, 254
240, 256, 258, 263, 264, 283, 316, Zijlsterdiep, 327
325, 327, 331, 362, 379, 401, 405, Zimmermann, J.C., 380
406, 407, 409, 414 Zitsewitz, H. von, 265
Wirtz, R., 254 Zoetermeer, 196, 199
Wissels, G., 234 Zuid-Beveland, 74, 148, 240, 241, 242,
Wissink, J.H.B., 275, 276 243, 247, 248, 250, 252, 254, 255,
Wit, A. de, 241 259
Witt, F., 252 Zuid-Beveland Canal, 248, 249, 250, 251,
Witte, H., 293 252, 253, 255, 259
Wittenberg, 110 Zuider Hoofdvaart, 326
Wodrig, A., 142, 150, 159, 207, 253, 259 Zuiderzee, 63
Woensdrecht, 245 Zuid-Holland, 63
Wons, 333, 335 Zuid-Willemsvaart Canal, 149, 150, 155,
Woud, ’t, 199 156, 207, 227, 228, 232, 233, 234,
Woudenberg, 72, 297 236, 240
Wuppertal, 139 Zundert, 229
Zurich, 333, 335
Yerseke, 240, 252 Zutphen, 128, 147, 148, 151, 270, 271
Ypenburg, airfield, 84, 85, 142, 149, 179, Zwarts, A., 274, 275, 276, 277
180, 181, 182, 184, 185, 187, 188, Zwartsluis, 326
190, 199, 203 Zwijndrecht, 351, 357, 369
Yugoslavia, 14, 18 Zwolle, 43, 270, 271, 329
BIOGRAPHICAL NOTES
Professor H. Amersfoort (1951) studied history at the University of

Leiden (1978) and subsequently worked at the Netherlands Institute of
Military History. In 1988, he obtained a PhD with his thesis Koning en
Kanton. De Nederlandse staat en het einde van de Zwitserse krijgsdienst
hier te lande 1814-1829. In 1994, he was appointed Professor of Military
History at the University of Amsterdam. In 2006, he joined the Nether-
lands Defence Academy as Professor of Military History and Strategy.
(editor, contributor)
P.H. Kamphuis (1953) studied history at the University of Groningen be-

fore working at the European Movement in the Netherlands for two years.
He worked at the Army Institute of Military History from 1979 and in
1990 he was appointed Director. When the various military history in-
stitutes merged in 2005 to become the Netherlands Institute of Military
History, he was appointed as the new institute’s first director. In 2000 he
took up the post of Secretary-General of the International Commission of
Military History. (editor, contributor)
Professor H.W. van den Doel (1962) taught at the University of Leiden
after obtaining a degree in history in 1987. From October 1988 to Febru-
ary 1990, he worked at the Army Institute of Military History as part of
his national service. In 1994, he obtained a PhD with his thesis De stille
macht. Het Europese binnenlands bestuur op Java en Madoera, 1808-1942.
He is currently Professor of ‘General History from 1870’ at the University
of Leiden. Since 2007 he has also been Dean of the Faculty of Arts. (con-
tributor)
P.M.J. de Koster (1963) studied contemporary history at the Catholic

University of Nijmegen. From April 1989 to June 1990, he completed his
national service at the Army Institute of Military History. From 1992 to
2006 he worked for the Immigration and Naturalisation Service of the
Ministry of Justice and since the end of 2006, he has worked for the Return
462 biographical notes
Migration & Departure Service of the same Ministry. (contributor/picto-

rial research)
Dr C.M. Schulten (1933) obtained his degree in French linguistics and

literature at the University of Leiden in 1962. He worked in secondary ed-
ucation for a number of years and then in 1966 was appointed as an aca-
demic researcher at the Grotius Institute. In that same year, he obtained
a PhD with his thesis Contribution à l’étude des termes militaires français
en néerlandais 1567-1625. From 1974 through 1989, he was Head of the
Army Institute of Military History. He held the post of Secretary-General
of the International Commission of Military History from 1980 to 1990 and
was its President from 1990 to 2000. From 1990 to 1995, he was Director of
the Netherlands Institute for War Documentation. (contributor)
Lieutenant Colonel (ret’d) Dr J.W.M. Schulten (1933) completed

his studies at the Institute of Technology (1955) before attending the Royal
Military Academy (rank promotion 1956). He held various troop and staff
positions with the Signals Service Arm and meanwhile studied history at
the University of Utrecht (1974). From 1976 to 1991 he taught Strategy
and Military History at the Royal Military Academy. In 1998 he obtained
a PhD from the University of Leiden with his thesis De geschiedenis van de
Ordedienst. Mythe en werkelijkheid van een verzetsorganisatie. (contributor)
L.C. Kaulartz (1950) worked for the Topographic Service of the Minis-
try of Defence from 1967 to 1983, as a cartographer and lithographer. He
has since then been working as a cartographer and graphic designer for
the Netherlands Institute of Military History. (cartography)
Captain T.A.H.F. Olivier (1974) studied history at the University of

Groningen and completed an internship at the Army Institute of Military
History. As a regular officer candidate, he was appointed as an academic
researcher at the Institute in 1999. In 2007, he took up a post with the ISTAR
battalion. (pictorial research)
PHOTO ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Archief War Photo Holland, Amstelveen: 165 (top), 186 (top), 194 (top), 197 (bot-
tom), 334 (bottom), 352.
Bundesarchiv, Koblenz: 22 (top), 29 (top), 100, 102, 110 (bottom), 123 (top), 127, 132,
211 (bottom), 235 (bottom), 237, 306 (top), 322, 337 (top), 340 (bottom), 371 (bot-
tom), 374 (top).
Netherlands Institute of Military History, The Hague: cover, 8, 17 (top), 27 (top), 29
(bottom), 31 (bottom), 36, 43 (bottom), 48, 52, 57, 65, 70 (bottom), 72, 75 (top), 79,
82, 90, 94, 143, 151, 176, 189, 200, 209, 216, 218, 220, 226, 233, 235 (top), 238, 249
(top), 253, 262, 266, 269, 273, 277, 281, 285, 289, 292, 306 (bottom), 311, 318, 328,
334 (top), 337 (bottom), 340 (top), 399 (bottom), 402, 408, 417.
Netherlands Institute for War Documentation, Amsterdam: 5, 8 (bottom), 11 (top), 70
(top), 154 (top), 159, 172 (top), 180, 206 (top), 211 (top), 213, 246, 298, 303 (top),
355, 391, 396.
Spaarnestad Fotoarchief, Haarlem: 2 (bottom), 17 (top), 22 (bottom), 25, 27 (bottom),
31 (top), 102 (top), 104 (top), 107, 110 (top), 115 (top), 147, 154 (bottom), 160, 172
(bottom), 223, 314 (top).
M. Brink, Veenendaal: 303 (bottom).
H.P. Deijs, Rhenen: 167, 314 (bottom).
L.J. Jordaan: 43 (top).
M.G.A. Jordaan-Everts, Zelhem: 2 (top).
J.A. van der Vorm, Dordrecht: 163 (bottom), 292, 349, 360, 366, 369, 371 (top), 373
(bottom), 377, 384 (bottom).
J. Winters: 11 (bottom), 249 (bottom), 344, 384 (top), 399 (top).
The Netherlands Institute of Military History has made every effort to establish rights
for the use of the illustrations printed in this volume. Should any party find that their
rights have been infringed, they are kindly requested to contact the Netherlands Institute
of Military History.
The Netherlands Institute of Military History (NIMH), based in The
Hague, Netherlands, is a specialised centre of expertise and research in the
area of Dutch military history. The institute publishes academic studies,
provides curriculums for military education institutes and universities and
makes its expertise and audiovisual collection available to a wide public.
See www.nimh.nl for more information.
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times until the early twentieth century. The series accepts high-quality monographs, col-
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Recent volumes in the series

20. Macleod, J. & P. Purseigle (eds.). Uncovered Fields. Perspectives in First World War
Studies. 2004. 978 90 04 13264 1
21. Worthington, D. Scots in Habsburg Service, 1618-1648. 2004. 978 90 04 13575 8
22. Griffin, M. Regulating Religion and Morality in the King’s Armies 1639-1646. 2004.
978 90 04 13170 5
23. Sicking, L. Neptune and the Netherlands. State, Economy, and War at Sea in the
Renaissance. 2004. 978 90 04 13850 6
24. Glozier, M. Scottish Soldiers in France in the Reign of the Sun King. Nursery for
Men of Honour. 2004. 978 90 04 13865 0
25. Villalon, L.J.A. & D.J. Kagay (eds.). The Hundred Years War. A Wider Focus. 2005.
978 90 04 13969 5
26. DeVries, K. A Cumulative Bibliography of Medieval Military History and Technology,
Update 2004. 2005. 978 90 04 14040 0
27. Hacker, B.C. World Military History Annotated Bibliography. Premodern and Non-
western Military Institutions (Works Published before 1967). 2005. 978 90 04 14071 4
28. Walton, S.A. (ed.). Instrumental in War. Science, Research, and Instruments Between
Knowledge and the World. 2005. 978 90 04 14281 7
29. Steinberg, J.W., B.W. Menning, D. Schimmelpenninck van der Oye, D. Wolff &
S. Yokote (eds.). The Russo-Japanese War in Global Perspective. World War Zero,
Volume I. 2005. 978 90 04 14284 8
30. Purseigle, P. (ed.). Warfare and Belligerence. Perspectives in First World War Studies.
2005. 978 90 04 14352 4
31. Waldman, J. Hafted Weapons in Medieval and Renaissance Europe. The Evolution
of European Staff Weapons between 1200 and 1650. 2005. 978 90 04 14409 5
32. Speelman, P.J. (ed.). War, Society and Enlightenment. The Works of General Lloyd.
2005. 978 90 04 14410 1
33. Wright, D.C. From War to Diplomatic Parity in Eleventh-Century China. Sung’s
Foreign Relations with Kitan Liao. 2005. 978 90 04 14456 9
34. Trim, D.J.B. & M.C. Fissel (eds.). Amphibious Warfare 1000-1700. Commerce,
State Formation and European Expansion. 2006. 978 90 04 13244 3
35. Kennedy, H. (ed.). Muslim Military Architecture in Greater Syria. From the Coming
of Islam to the Ottoman Period. 2006. 978 90 04 14713 3
36. Haldon, J.F. (ed.). General Issues in the Study of Medieval Logistics. Sources, Problems
and Methodologies. 2006. 978 90 04 14769 0
37. Christie, N. & M. Yazigi (eds). Noble Ideals and Bloody Realities. Warfare in the
Middle Ages. 2006. 978 90 04 15024 9
38. Shaw, C. Italy and the European Powers. The Impact of War, 1500-1530. 2006.
978 90 04 15163 5
39. Biggs, D. Three Armies in Britain. The Irish Campaign of Richard II and the Usur-
pation of Henry IV, 1397-99. 2006. 978 90 04 15215 1
40. Wolff, D., S.G. Marks, B.W. Menning, D. Schimmelpenninck van der Oye, J.W.
Steinberg & S. Yokote (eds.). The Russo-Japanese War in Global Perspective. World
War Zero, Volume II. 2007. 978 90 04 15416 2
41. Ostwald, J. Vauban under Siege. Engineering Efficiency and Martial Vigor in the War
of the Spanish Succession. 2007. 978 90 04 15489 6. 2009 Distinguished Book Award
42. McCullough, R.L. Coercion, Conversion and Counterinsurgency in Louis XIV’s
France. 2007. 978 90 04 15661 6
43. Røksund, A. The Jeune École. The Strategy of the Weak. 2007. 978 90 04 15723 1
44. Hosler, J.D. Henry II. A Medieval Soldier at War, 1147-1189. 2007. 978 90 04 15724 8
45. Hoyos, D. Truceless War. Carthage’s Fight for Survival, 241 to 237 BC. 2007.
978 90 04 16076 7
46. DeVries, K. A Cumulative Bibliography of Medieval Military History and Technology,
Update 2003-2006. 2008. 978 90 04 16445 1
47. France, J. (ed.). Mercenaries and Paid Men. The Mercenary Identity in the Middle
Ages. 2008. 978 90 04 16447 5
48. Meyer, J. (ed). British Popular Culture and the First World War. 2008.
978 90 04 16658 5
49. Jones, H., J. O’Brien & C. Schmidt-Supprian (eds.). Untold War. New Perspectives
in First World War Studies. 2008. 978 90 04 16659 2
50. Burgtorf, J. The Central Convent of Hospitallers and Templars. History, Organization,
and Personnel (1099/1120-1310). 2008. 978 90 04 16660 8
51. Villalon, A.L.J. & D.J. Kagay (eds.). The Hundred Years War (Part II). Different
Vistas. 2008. 978 90 04 16821 3
52. González de León, F. The Road to Rocroi. Class, Culture and Command in the
Spanish Army of Flanders, 1567-1659. 2009. 978 90 04 17082 7
53. Lawrence, D.R. The Complete Soldier. Military Books and Military Culture in Early
Stuart England, 1603-1645. 2009. 978 90 04 17079 7
54. Beckett, I.F.W. (ed.). 1917: Beyond the Western Front. 2009. 978 90 04 17139 8
55. Whetham, D. Just Wars and Moral Victories. Surprise, Deception and the Normative
Framework of European War in the Later Middle Ages. 2009. 978 90 04 17153 4
56. Miller, S.M. (ed.). Soldiers and Settlers in Africa, 1850-1918. 2009. 978 90 04 17751 2
57. Amersfoort, H. & P. Kamphuis (eds.). May 1940. The Battle for the Netherlands.
2010. 978 90 04 18438 1
58. Murdoch, S. The Terror of the Seas? Scottish Maritime Warfare, 1513-1713. 2010.
978 90 04 18568 5
59. Fagan, G.G. & M. Trundle (eds.). New Perspectives on Ancient Warfare. 2010.
978 90 04 18598 2
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Copyright 2010 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands.

printed in the netherlands

II. The Emergence of the German Threat ............................................ 13

III. Between Hope and Fear: The Netherlands armed forces

IV. The Gathering Storm: The German armed forces

V. The Generals’ Duel: Five days of war at the military

VI. ‘Fall Festung’: A surprise attack on The Hague . ........................... 179

VII. Disputed Territory: The battle in the Dutch provinces of

Operations against the bridges over the river Maas

IX. “Vorwärts denken, vorwärts sehen, vorwärts reiten!”:

The bombing of Rotterdam

XI. Myth and reality ............................................................................... 395

Annex: Table of land forces rank equivalents . ....................................... 419

Annotated bibliography ............................................................................ 421

Biographical notes . .................................................................................... 461

The original, Dutch-language edition of this book was published in 1990,

Key to symbols Key to maps and

Dutch unit air-transportable unit XXXXX

Belgian unit air force unit XXXX

French unit MR motorcyclist unit XXX

German unit navy unit

reconnaissance unit / motorised unit

antitank unit armoured train

anti-aircraft unit cyclist unit

supply unit Gr grenadiers unit

staff unit DivTr division troops

medical unit PERS personnel

paratroop unit torpedomen unit

XXX Apeldoorn Enschede

Flushing Kapelle XXX hr

Eindhoven Horst 9 Duisburg

Knokke VLAANDEREN Brasschaat

Turnhout Budel Düsseldorf

Cartography: Louis Kaulartz / NIMH

trambridge Hoeve Ypenburg

Zestienhoven airfield Dutch position

Ockenburg 12/5 landings of the Fallschirmjägerregiment

St. Willebrord Ulvenhout

Rijsbergen Goirle Best

Langenboom Nieuwmill Lagenberkt

3 St. Hubert Beugen

St. Oedenrode Gemert Well

Nunen Peel-Raam Position

Someren Eind Beringen Tegelen 9

Walcheren, Noord-Beveland, Zuid-Beveland and Zeeuws-Vlaanderen

Cartography: Louis Kaulartz / NIMH

NOORD- St. Annaland Steenbergen

Breskens R- Bath position

Zelzate St. Pauwels

Eeklo Ertvelde Haasdonk

2 2-8 13.30 hrs. 12.00 hrs.

Front line 10.30 hrs.

2 1-8 12.30 hrs.

In 1933, the Netherlands was still in a depression.��

peacetime organisation adopted.��

for the army.��