The Battle for The Hague

On 10 May 1940, in the first hours of the German offensive in the West, hundreds of Junkers Ju 52 transport aircraft appeared over The Hague. The paratroopers and infantry they carried were to seize three airfields around the city, enter the seat of the Queen, the government and the high command, and force the Netherlands to capitulate that same day. By evening almost nothing was left of the plan. Dutch soldiers, many of them recruits with only a few weeks’ training, retook all three airfields and captured hundreds of Germans, and the runway at Ypenburg had become a graveyard of burnt-out aircraft. Remnants of the landing force held out in the dunes and villages between The Hague and Rotterdam until the end of the campaign.

The Battle for The Hague is sometimes called the first failed parachute assault in history. That claim needs two qualifications. A failed parachute landing had already occurred a month earlier in Norway: a company of German paratroopers dropped near Dombås on 14 April to cut the road from Oslo to Trondheim had to surrender to the Norwegians after five days of fighting. At The Hague, however, something different and far larger was at stake: it was the first large-scale airborne operation in history intended to capture a capital and topple a state at a single stroke, and as such it ended in failure. Strictly speaking, it was above all the air-landed infantry, rather than the paratroopers themselves, that failed.

Operation Festung

Airborne forces were a particular favourite of Adolf Hitler, who backed them in the face of the Army General Staff’s scepticism. From the autumn of 1939 General Kurt Student, commander of the 7th Air Division (PL), had been preparing to use them in the West. The original plans, which the Belgians partly learnt of through the Mechelen incident, envisaged a landing on the Meuse in Belgium. At the end of January 1940 Hitler ordered almost the entire airborne force to be concentrated against the Netherlands, and he added the strike on The Hague to the plan himself, in the final phase of preparations. He was counting on the capture of Queen Wilhelmina, the government and the Commander-in-Chief, General Henri Winkelman, to end the war with the Netherlands in a single day.

The whole operation, named “Fall Festung”, was commanded by Student. It comprised two groups. The southern group, which Student led in person, was to seize the bridges at Moerdijk, Dordrecht and Rotterdam, together with Waalhaven airfield, to open the way for the armoured forces advancing from the east. The northern group, aimed at The Hague, was commanded by Generalleutnant Hans von Sponeck, commander of the 22nd Infantry Division, which had been trained for air transport. He had at his disposal about two-thirds of his division – the 47th and 65th Infantry Regiments with supporting units – and five companies of paratroopers from the 2nd Parachute Rifle Regiment. The paratroopers were to land first at three airfields – Ypenburg, between The Hague and Delft; Ockenburg, on the edge of the city by the dunes; and Valkenburg, near Leiden – and neutralise their defences, after which further waves of Ju 52s carrying infantry would land on the runways. These forces were to enter The Hague from three sides, while a special Abwehr group under Captain Adolf von Feldmann, carrying lists of wanted persons, was to detain people connected with Dutch intelligence. Sponeck was personally to take the Queen and her family into “protection”. His orders stipulated that no harm was to come to the royal family. According to Dutch researchers, the general had even brought his dress uniform with him.

The operation in the Netherlands as a whole involved nearly 15,000 men, including about 4,000 paratroopers, and some 430–450 Ju 52 aircraft. It was supported by the combat aircraft of the 2nd Air Fleet under General Albert Kesselring, which since January had served the front of Army Group B under General Fedor von Bock. Bock, as historians later observed, had little interest in capturing the Dutch government: he regarded it as an extra rather than a condition of victory. The planners, with Student at their head, did, however, underestimate the Dutch air defences. They assumed the defenders would abandon their posts as the Norwegians had done at Sola and Fornebu airfields on 9 April. The Dutch, meanwhile, had drawn lessons from Norway: they had blocked roads and unused landing grounds, and their air force and anti-aircraft artillery were to be at full readiness from dawn. Around The Hague there were also some 20,000 soldiers of I Corps and depot units, twice as many as the Germans intended to land.

Ypenburg

Shortly before four in the morning Dutch time (German clocks were then an hour and forty minutes ahead), German aircraft flew over the Netherlands towards the sea to simulate a raid on England, and turned back over the North Sea. The first bombs, however, fell on The Hague: a few minutes after four, Luftwaffe aircraft bombed the Waalsdorp military camp and the neighbouring Alexander barracks. More than 120 Dutch soldiers were killed – 137, according to some sources. At around 4.15 a.m. bombs fell on Ypenburg, where Fokker D.XXI fighters were based. The Dutch pilots managed to take off and fought an unequal battle against superior German forces. The light Douglas bombers, thrown into air combat for want of fighters, were almost all shot down.

At around 4.35 a.m. the aircraft carrying Captain Noster’s parachute battalion appeared over the airfield. Fire from Dutch anti-aircraft guns and machine guns broke up the formation. The pilots swerved away from the fire and dropped their men far from the target, between Delft, Rijswijk, Nootdorp and Overschie. According to a German report, only 27 of this group’s 53 aircraft returned. When the first Ju 52s carrying infantry of the 65th Regiment began to land at around 5.15 a.m., the airfield’s defences were still largely intact. The aircraft rolled straight into the fire of the 3rd Battalion of the Grenadiers Regiment, Swedish-built Landsverk armoured cars and guns from near Delft. Many caught fire before they even touched down. Few soldiers from the first two waves survived, and the regimental commander, Colonel Georg Friemel, was taken prisoner. The burning wrecks blocked the runway, so the following aircraft came down wherever they could: in meadows, on beaches and on the obstacle-strewn motorway from The Hague to Rotterdam, which, according to one Dutch historian, looked like a car park for transport aircraft. Some turned back to Germany with their troops still on board. The aircraft carrying the divisional staff, including Sponeck himself, was diverted to Ockenburg.

One Ju 52 was hit and crashed in the middle of The Hague, not far from the Dutch headquarters. In the wreckage a briefcase containing the operational orders was found, later known as the “Sponeck papers”. After the war some German writers claimed that the operation had been betrayed and that the Dutch had been waiting for the landing. Dutch researchers have shown this to be untrue: the documents were not read until the afternoon, when Ypenburg was already being retaken, and the defenders had been taken by surprise. They had prepared only for an airborne landing in general, and the Germans made the mistake of landing on an airfield whose defences they had failed to destroy.

Even so, the scattered paratroopers managed to seize the airfield buildings at around eight o’clock. A group that had arrived in cars from Delft struck the Grenadiers from the rear. According to Dutch researchers, the Germans drove captured Dutch soldiers before them as human shields, in open violation of the laws of war. A swastika flag was hoisted over the building. But the Germans got no further: the Hoornbrug bridge at Rijswijk, leading into The Hague, was held by soldiers gathered from broken units and by recruits from Delft.

The Dutch counter-attack began before noon. At Voorburg Second Lieutenant George Maduro, a young cavalry officer from Curaçao, led an assault across a small bridge on the Dorrepaal manor house, from which the paratroopers controlled the area, and took several dozen Germans prisoner. Maduro later served in the resistance and died in February 1945 in Dachau concentration camp; his parents funded the Madurodam miniature park in The Hague, which bears his name. At Ypenburg three batteries of field artillery began shelling the buildings held by the Germans. When the buildings caught fire, the paratroopers started to surrender, and a single company of Grenadiers took more than 120 prisoners. At around 3.10 p.m. the airfield was also bombed by a handful of British Blenheims requested by the Dutch; three of them were shot down. In the evening the last pockets of resistance in the Hoeve Loos and Johannahoeve farmsteads fell. At Ypenburg and in its surroundings some 1,300 Germans were taken prisoner. Several hundred soldiers who had landed near Delft were gathered together by the divisional medical officer, Lieutenant Colonel Werner Wischhusen, the only senior officer to survive there.

Ockenburg and Valkenburg

Ockenburg, an auxiliary landing ground made up of joined football pitches, was defended by fewer than a hundred poorly armed recruits under Captain Boot. Most of the paratroopers intended for this airfield were mistakenly dropped far to the south, as far as Hook of Holland, and some drowned in the sea. A quarter of an hour or so later, however, dozens of Ju 52s carrying infantry and the divisional staff landed here. By 7.45 a.m. the Germans had overwhelmed the defence, and Captain Boot had been killed. Sponeck landed here at around seven o’clock. Attempts to enter The Hague through Loosduinen were repulsed by the Grenadiers. Dutch Fokker T.V bombers and three howitzer batteries from Poeldijk set fire to the aircraft standing on the field, and at around 2.30 p.m. two companies of Grenadiers retook the landing ground. Sponeck withdrew with several hundred men into the woods and dunes south of the airfield. In the evening, having established radio contact with Germany, he received orders to break through towards Rotterdam.

Valkenburg near Leiden was a newly built airfield whose ground had not yet dried out and which had no anti-aircraft defences. After an air raid that scattered some of the defenders, Lieutenant Gerhart Schirmer’s parachute company and the first wave of infantry of the 47th Regiment seized the airfield at around six o’clock and took about 150 Dutch soldiers prisoner. The victory proved to be a trap. The heavy Ju 52s sank into the waterlogged turf and could not take off again, and their wrecks blocked the following waves. Many aircraft landed on the beaches between Katwijk and Scheveningen, where the troops they put down held the dunes for all five days of fighting. Dutch artillery and light bombers destroyed several dozen aircraft on the airfield. The Germans took the village of Valkenburg and the bridges at Katwijk, and their patrols reached the road from The Hague to Amsterdam. At around 5.30 p.m. Major Mallinckrodt’s battalion retook the airfield; of the roughly 60 aircraft that had landed there, only a dozen or so remained undamaged. In the village of Valkenburg itself, however, several hundred Germans held out until the capitulation, keeping Dutch prisoners in a church that was being hit by Dutch artillery shells.

The day’s toll

By the evening of 10 May all three airfields were back in Dutch hands. According to Dutch calculations, some 240 Dutch and some 260 German soldiers were killed around The Hague on the first day. More than 1,600 Germans were taken prisoner, among them the commanders of a regiment and of a parachute battalion. The Dutch held them in barracks and in the prison at Scheveningen, and on 13–14 May some 1,200 prisoners from the area around The Hague were shipped from IJmuiden to Britain, from where many were later sent to camps in Canada. After the Dutch capitulation, therefore, they did not return to their units, which was a permanent loss for the Germans. According to the most frequently cited figures, in the whole Dutch campaign the Luftwaffe lost some 220 of the roughly 430 Ju 52s it committed there, a large proportion of them on the airfields and fields around The Hague.

In the south the picture was entirely different. Student’s group achieved almost all its objectives. Paratroopers seized both bridges at Moerdijk, the bridge at Dordrecht and Waalhaven airfield, where further battalions landed. In the centre of Rotterdam twelve Heinkel He 59 seaplanes put down troops who captured the Willemsbrug over the Nieuwe Maas. These bridges were to open the way for a panzer division advancing through North Brabant, and it was they, not the landings around The Hague, that decided the fate of the campaign.

Five days surrounded

The defeat at The Hague had another side for the Dutch, too. Aircraft landings scattered over a wide area created the impression that the Germans had put down far more troops than they actually had. Rumours spread through The Hague of paratroopers in Dutch uniforms and of a fifth column, and many members of the Dutch National Socialist Movement and German citizens were arrested. The high command kept most of I Corps around the capital, where it could otherwise have been of use on the southern front.

In accordance with his orders, during the night of 10–11 May Sponeck led his men out of the woods near Ockenburg and, slipping skilfully between Dutch units, reached the village of Overschie on the northern edge of Rotterdam on 12 May. There he joined up with Wischhusen’s group and dug in with about a thousand men. The Dutch were slow to deal with this force, and when on 14 May they finally moved against it with more than two thousand men, they were interrupted by news of the capitulation. As was later written, Sponeck was spared the humiliation of surrender only by the bombing of Rotterdam on 14 May. Some Dutch authors have suggested that Hermann Göring pressed for the raid partly to rescue his protégé, but this is a supposition rather than a proven fact.

Place in the war

The strike on The Hague did not achieve the purpose for which it had been planned. The Queen, the government and the high command remained at liberty, and on 13 May Wilhelmina and her ministers sailed for Britain, from where for five years they waged war as a government-in-exile. Had the landing succeeded, the Germans would have held the head of state and might have tried to bring the country to heel as they had Denmark. Instead the Netherlands remained in the war on the Allied side, with its merchant fleet, its colonies in the East Indies and most of its gold reserves, which had prudently been sent abroad. The army’s swift capitulation on 15 May was decided not by events around The Hague but by the bridges in the south, the tanks and the bombing of Rotterdam.

For the German airborne forces, 10 May was the first hard lesson. The parachute companies proved too weak to overwhelm defended airfields, communications failed, and infantry in aircraft landing under fire was helpless. Dutch military historians point out that the loss of several hundred transport aircraft was still felt by the Luftwaffe in the Battle of Britain and on Crete, citing Kesselring’s own post-war remarks. A year later, in May 1941, Student applied a similar scheme on Crete: the Germans took the island, but at the cost of such heavy losses that Hitler never again agreed to an airborne operation on a comparable scale. The Allies drew the opposite conclusion from the successes at Eben-Emael and Rotterdam and began building their own airborne divisions. Their largest operation, Market Garden in September 1944, was an attempt to seize a chain of bridges in the Netherlands from the air, much like the German plan of May 1940, and it too ended in failure.

Sponeck, awarded the Knight’s Cross for the campaign, later led the 22nd Division into the Crimea. In December 1941, against orders, he withdrew a corps from the Kerch Peninsula in the face of a Soviet landing, for which a court martial sentenced him to death; Hitler commuted the sentence to six years’ fortress imprisonment. After the attempt on Hitler’s life on 20 July 1944 he was shot, although he had had no connection with the plot. Researchers also point out that units under his command co-operated with Einsatzgruppe D in 1941 in the murder of Jews in southern Ukraine and the Crimea.