Dutch Campaign

The Dutch campaign was the shortest of the campaigns in which, in 1939–1940, Germany conquered states that resisted by force of arms. At dawn on 10 May 1940, without a declaration of war, the Wehrmacht invaded the neutral Netherlands, and German airborne troops landed in the very heart of the country, near The Hague and in Rotterdam. The strike at the seat of the Queen and the government ended in disaster, but the paratroops held the bridges over the Meuse and the Rhine at Rotterdam, Dordrecht and Moerdijk, across which the 9th Panzer Division entered “Fortress Holland” from the south. The French Seventh Army, which was to link up with the Dutch near Breda, withdrew after two days, and on 13 May the main defensive position on the Grebbeberg fell. On 14 May the Luftwaffe bombed Rotterdam while negotiations for its surrender were under way, and when the Germans threatened Utrecht with the same fate, the Commander-in-Chief, General Henri Winkelman, decided to lay down arms. The instrument of capitulation was signed on 15 May at Rijsoord. The fighting in Zeeland, where the Dutch and French fought on, ended on 17 May. The Netherlands as a state did not capitulate: Queen Wilhelmina and the government moved to London and carried on the war until 1945.

Name and dates

In Poland it is called the Dutch campaign; in the Netherlands it is known as the “May days” (meidagen) or the “Battle of the Netherlands”, and in English-language writing as the Battle of the Netherlands or the German invasion of the Netherlands. For the Germans it was part of the first phase of the great offensive in the west, Case Yellow (Fall Gelb), alongside the attack on Belgium, Luxembourg and France.

The campaign began on 10 May 1940, when at about 4 a.m. German aircraft attacked Dutch airfields and ground forces crossed the border. Its end may be dated to 17 May, when the Germans took Walcheren with Middelburg and Vlissingen, the last part of Zeeland north of the Western Scheldt still resisting. The date most often given, however, is 14 May: that afternoon Winkelman issued the order to cease fighting, and in the evening he announced it on the radio. He signed the written capitulation before noon on 15 May. The days after 17 May belong to the fighting in Belgium: on 18 May North Beveland surrendered, on 19 May the last Dutch units in Zeelandic Flanders were withdrawn to Ostend at French request, and the Germans occupied Zeelandic Flanders by 27 May in the course of the Belgian campaign.

Background

The Netherlands had not fought in the First World War, and in 1939 it hoped to stay out of the conflict this time as well. On the outbreak of war it declared its neutrality, and the government of Dirk Jan de Geer avoided anything that Germany might regard as a provocation. The army, mobilised at the end of August 1939, numbered some 280,000 men but was wretchedly equipped and trained. Throughout the 1920s and the early 1930s money had been saved on defence, and until 1938 conscripts served for only 24 weeks. The Dutch did not have a single battle tank, only two squadrons of armoured cars and a few tankettes. The artillery was mostly obsolete and horse-drawn, and guns ordered from Germany had never arrived. The army air service had some 125 serviceable aircraft, most of them biplanes; the most modern were the Fokker D.XXI fighters and the twin-engined Fokker G.Is.

The Dutch defence plan was based on water. The western part of the country, with Amsterdam, The Hague, Rotterdam and Utrecht, known as Fortress Holland (Vesting Holland), lay largely below sea level and could be shielded by the inundations of the New Dutch Water Line to the east, by the IJsselmeer to the north and by the broad estuaries of the Rhine and the Meuse to the south. In front of it, from the autumn of 1939, the Main Defence Line was built: in the north the Grebbe Line at the foot of the Utrechtse Heuvelrug hills, between the IJsselmeer and the Rhine, and in the south the Peel-Raam position in the Peel marshes of North Brabant. Along the border, on the IJssel and the Meuse, there were only frontier battalions, whose task was to blow the bridges. In February 1940, after disputes with the government over strategy, the Commander-in-Chief, General Izaak Reijnders, resigned and was replaced by General Henri Winkelman, a retired officer. Winkelman decided to fight the decisive battle on the Grebbe Line and, in the event of an attack, to abandon the Peel-Raam position at once and withdraw III Corps behind the rivers. North Brabant, through which the French were to come to the rescue, was thus left almost undefended.

Secret staff talks with Belgium and France produced no joint plan. The French Commander-in-Chief, General Maurice Gamelin, added the “Breda variant” to the Dyle Plan: in the event of a German attack the strongest army of the French reserve, General Henri Giraud’s Seventh Army, was to hurry along the coast as far as Breda and link the Allied front with Fortress Holland. The Dutch, however, did not prepare this area for defence.

The Netherlands had been warned. From 1939 Colonel Hans Oster of German military intelligence (the Abwehr) passed successive dates of the offensive to his friend Major Gijsbertus Sas, the Dutch military attaché in Berlin. Hitler, however, postponed the attack so many times that The Hague ceased to believe these warnings. The Dutch were also alarmed by the abduction of two British agents from their territory in November 1939 and by the Mechelen incident in January 1940, and above all by the German landings in Denmark and Norway on 9 April. On 19 April the government declared a state of siege throughout the country, and airfields and ports were reinforced with additional battalions. On the evening of 9 May Oster told Sas on the telephone: “Tomorrow at dawn.” The troops were put on alert.

Forces and plans

Directive No. 6 of October 1939 envisaged occupying only part of the Netherlands, but at the insistence of Hermann Göring, who wanted the Dutch airfields for use against England, it was decided in January 1940 to conquer the whole country. The Netherlands was not, however, the Germans’ main axis. The strongest forces were to strike through the Ardennes, and the attack by General Fedor von Bock’s Army Group B on central Belgium was bait meant to draw the Allies there. The weakest of the German armies, General Georg von Küchler’s Eighteenth Army, was assigned to defeat the Dutch. It had several infantry divisions raised in the 1939 mobilisation, the Wehrmacht’s only cavalry formation, the 1st Cavalry Division, the 9th Panzer Division with 141 tanks, most of them light, and motorised units of the SS-Verfügungstruppe and the Leibstandarte SS Adolf Hitler. The German divisions were larger and better armed than the Dutch ones, but the Eighteenth Army lacked the numerical superiority needed to break through the fortifications quickly.

The gap was to be filled by the Luftwaffe’s airborne forces under Generalleutnant Kurt Student: the paratroops of the 7th Air Division (PL) and the infantry of Generalleutnant Hans von Sponeck’s 22nd Air Landing Division, carried in Junkers Ju 52 transport aircraft, some 430 of which were allotted to the operation. The plan, codenamed Fall Festung, provided for two blows. Sponeck’s group was to seize the three airfields around The Hague – Ypenburg, Ockenburg and Valkenburg – enter the city and capture the Queen, the government and the high command, which was expected to bring about an immediate Dutch capitulation. Student, with the main body of the 7th Division and part of the 22nd, was to take Waalhaven airfield in Rotterdam and the bridges at Rotterdam, Dordrecht and Moerdijk, which opened the way into Fortress Holland from the south. There the 9th Panzer Division was to reach them after breaking through the Peel-Raam position. At the same time two infantry divisions and the SS were to attack the Grebbe Line, while the cavalry was to occupy the north and try to cross the Afsluitdijk, the thirty-kilometre dam closing off the IJsselmeer. Air support was provided by General Albert Kesselring’s Luftflotte 2. The Germans reckoned that Fortress Holland would fall in three to five days.

Course: 10 May

On the night of 9/10 May German bombers flew across the Netherlands towards the North Sea as if heading for England, then turned back and at dawn bombed the Dutch airfields. The Dutch air force lost more than half its aircraft on the first day, although its pilots shot down or destroyed many German machines. Ground forces crossed the border, and several groups of soldiers of the Abwehr’s Brandenburg special unit, some disguised as Dutch military policemen and helped by members of the Dutch Nazi party, the NSB, tried to seize the bridges over the IJssel and the Meuse before they could be blown. In most places they failed and the Dutch destroyed the bridges, but at Gennep an armoured train crossed the undamaged railway bridge over the Meuse, followed by a troop train carrying an infantry battalion, which detrained behind the Peel-Raam position.

Near The Hague Sponeck’s operation ended in disaster. At Ypenburg Dutch armoured cars and machine guns destroyed more than a dozen Ju 52s of the first waves before their crews and troops could get out, and the wrecks blocked the runway. Subsequent aircraft landed wherever they could, in meadows, on beaches and on roads, scattering the troops. The Germans took Ockenburg and Valkenburg, but at the unfinished airfield of Valkenburg the aircraft sank into the soft ground, so none of the airfields could receive reinforcements. That same day Dutch counter-attacks, supported by artillery and air strikes, recaptured all three airfields, and the scattered German groups took refuge in the surrounding villages and dunes. Not a single German unit entered The Hague. The Dutch took some 1,600 Germans prisoner in the area of The Hague, and managed to ship some 1,200 of them to Britain before the capitulation.

In and south of Rotterdam the Germans succeeded. Twelve Heinkel He 59 seaplanes landed on the Nieuwe Maas in the middle of the city, and the troops they carried seized the Willemsbrug road bridge and a bridgehead on the northern bank. Paratroops took Waalhaven airfield, where further Ju 52s began landing with Oberstleutnant Dietrich von Choltitz’s infantry. Paratroops also seized the bridge at Dordrecht, although the Dutch garrison held on in the town itself, and the long road and railway bridges over the Hollands Diep at Moerdijk. A counter-attack by the Dutch navy ended with the destroyer Van Galen being sunk by bombers.

On the eastern border the Germans crossed the IJssel and the Meuse on pontoon bridges. Near Arnhem the Leibstandarte and the 207th Infantry Division reached the Grebbe Line that same day. In North Brabant the Dutch III Corps withdrew behind the rivers that morning, earlier than planned, leaving only a weak screen on the Peel-Raam position. In the evening the Germans broke through it at Mill, and its commander, Colonel Leonard Schmidt, ordered a retreat to the Zuid-Willemsvaart canal. In the north the 1st Cavalry Division, delayed by demolished bridges, reached the Meppel–Groningen line, and in Limburg the Germans took Maastricht before noon, although the Dutch had managed to blow the bridges over the Meuse there. In the evening the first French armoured cars of the Seventh Army reached the Dutch border.

Course: 11–12 May

Winkelman wanted first to destroy the German airborne landings and to enable the French to build a front in North Brabant. Neither aim was achieved. The Light Division, the only mobile formation of the Dutch army, whose infantry moved on bicycles, failed on 11 May to force the Noord river and get onto the island of IJsselmonde, and the next day it became bogged down in fighting for the outskirts of Dordrecht. In Rotterdam the Dutch could not eliminate the German bridgehead at the Willemsbrug, where a few dozen Germans held out in a single office building. Near The Hague Sponeck’s scattered groups continued to resist, and Dutch commanders, convinced that a “fifth column” was at work, confined themselves to defence and to hunting supposed saboteurs.

In North Brabant the defence collapsed. The order to withdraw from the Peel-Raam position did not reach all units, and on 11 May the Germans crossed the Zuid-Willemsvaart by an intact bridge. The French had expected the Dutch to hold the enemy for several days and were surprised to find only the remnants of shattered battalions in front of them. On the morning of 12 May the reconnaissance troops of the 9th Panzer Division captured Colonel Schmidt, and in the afternoon they reached the bridges at Moerdijk, cutting Fortress Holland off from the Allies in Belgium. Gamelin, with Giraud’s right flank threatened by the German Sixth Army, ordered the Seventh Army to fall back towards Antwerp. The French units that had reached Tilburg and Breda switched to delaying actions, and the road to Moerdijk remained open. The Dutch government asked Winston Churchill, who had been Prime Minister for two days, for three divisions. Churchill replied that he had no reserves at all. The British sent only a battalion of Irish Guards to Hook of Holland, a few motor torpedo boats and demolition parties, which destroyed fuel stocks and port installations so that they would not fall into German hands. Winkelman ordered the oil tanks at Pernis near Rotterdam to be set on fire.

On the Grebbe Line the SS regiment Der Führer had already taken the outpost line on the Grebbeberg hill near Rhenen on 11 May. On 12 May it broke into the main line, and one of its battalion commanders, Hilmar Wäckerle, penetrated more than a kilometre and a half beyond the stop line (Stoplijn) before being surrounded. Dutch reserves, committed late and piecemeal, could not recover the lost ground. In the north, also on 12 May, the German cavalry broke through the thinly held position at the eastern end of the Afsluitdijk and drove its defenders back onto the dam.

Course: 13 May

On the morning of 13 May Winkelman reported to the government that the situation was critical. Allied help was not coming, and German tanks could pass through Rotterdam at any moment. The government decided to fight on but gave the Commander-in-Chief full authority to surrender the army when he judged it necessary. Around noon Queen Wilhelmina sailed from Hook of Holland aboard the British destroyer HMS Hereward. She wanted to reach Zeeland, but because of mines the ship sailed to England. The heir to the throne, Princess Juliana, had already left with her family on the evening of 12 May. On the evening of 13 May the ministers sailed for London aboard HMS Windsor, handing Winkelman full authority in the country. The reserves of gold and diamonds were shipped to England on British and Dutch vessels.

That same day tanks of the 9th Panzer Division crossed the Moerdijk bridge, which the Dutch had been unable to destroy either with bombs or with artillery fire. The Light Division, trying to cut the German corridor on the Island of Dordrecht, ran into the tanks. Its soldiers mistook the red recognition panels on the armour for the orange markings of their French allies and went out to meet the Germans. The division, raked with fire and bombed by Stukas, withdrew from the island. The German tanks reached the southern bank of the Nieuwe Maas in Rotterdam. A final attack by Dutch marines on the bridgehead at the Willemsbrug came close to success but was called off.

The fate of the Grebbeberg was decided on 13 May by chance. A Dutch counter-attack from the north by Brigade B collided with an attack by two SS battalions moving in the same direction to roll up the line from the rear. In the afternoon an attack by several dozen Ju 87 dive bombers turned the brigade’s withdrawal into a rout, and panic spread to the reserves near Rhenen too. A gap several kilometres wide opened in the line. That evening the commander of the field army, General Jan van Voorst tot Voorst, ordered the Grebbe Line to be abandoned and a withdrawal by night to the eastern front of Fortress Holland, the New Dutch Water Line. In three days on the Grebbeberg the Dutch lost more than 400 killed, the Germans 238 according to official figures and 250–300 according to Dutch estimates.

The fighting on the Afsluitdijk took a different course. The Kornwerderzand position, a complex of bunkers by the sluices halfway along the dam, was the only modern Dutch fortification. On 13 May German bicycle troops tried to approach it along the completely open dam and were driven back by fire from the bunkers. The next day the German guns shelling the position had to shift their emplacements under fire from the Dutch gunboat Johan Maurits van Nassau. Kornwerderzand held out until the capitulation. It was one of the few Allied positions in 1940 that the Germans failed to take.

The bombing of Rotterdam and the capitulation

On 14 May the Eighteenth Army was preparing to cross the Nieuwe Maas in Rotterdam, where the northern bank was defended by several battalions under Colonel Pieter Scharroo. Hitler, in Directive No. 11, ordered Dutch resistance to be broken quickly, and already on 13 May Küchler had instructed the commander of XXXIX Corps, General Rudolf Schmidt, to break the resistance in Rotterdam “by all means”, if necessary threatening the destruction of the city and carrying it out. Schmidt and Student wanted a short air attack on the defensive positions that would let the tanks cross the bridge. Göring, worried about the fate of the encircled paratroops, pushed through a much heavier raid. Some 90 Heinkel He 111 bombers of Kampfgeschwader 54 took off before noon.

In the morning Schmidt sent Scharroo an ultimatum: if the city did not surrender, it would be destroyed. Winkelman ordered him to play for time, since the document was unsigned. When the Dutch returned with a second ultimatum, now signed, with a deadline of 4.20 p.m., Schmidt informed his command that negotiations were under way and that the raid must be called off. Around 1.20 p.m., however, two formations of bombers appeared over Rotterdam. According to German explanations they did not receive the recall order because they had already reeled in their radio aerials. Schmidt had red flares fired. Only part of the formation approaching from the south-west turned away, after the first three aircraft had already released their bombs. The remaining 54 bombed the city centre. Some 1,300 bombs fell on Rotterdam, and the fires, which nobody fought, consumed the medieval centre. Some 800–900 inhabitants were killed (some authors give 814 dead), some 80,000 were left homeless and some 25,000 buildings were burned out. Allied and Dutch media reported at the time that 30,000 people had died. At 3.50 p.m. Scharroo surrendered the city. Göring ordered a second raid as well, which Schmidt managed to call off at the last moment by reporting that Rotterdam had already been taken. That evening Student, trying to stop firing by an SS unit after the city had already surrendered, was seriously wounded in the head.

Winkelman initially wanted to fight on, since before the war it had been assumed that air raids on cities would not be a reason to capitulate. In the afternoon, however, he learned that the Germans were demanding the surrender of Utrecht, and leaflets dropped over the city threatened it with “the fate of Warsaw”, which in September 1939 had capitulated after being wrecked by bombs and shells. He concluded that the Germans would destroy every city that resisted and that the Netherlands had no means of defending itself against this. At 4.50 p.m. he ordered his commanders to destroy their weapons and lay them down before the nearest German units, and at about 7 p.m. he announced his decision on the radio. Some of the troops, especially units that had not been in action, received the order with disbelief. The commander of the navy, Vice-Admiral Johannes Furstner, left for England that morning, and the warships that could do so sailed there before the capitulation. The gunboat Johan Maurits van Nassau was sunk by bombers during that passage.

On the morning of 15 May Winkelman went to Küchler’s headquarters in the village of Rijsoord near Rotterdam. The instrument of capitulation was signed before noon. Winkelman refused to accept that Dutch airmen who went on fighting alongside the Allies should be treated as francs-tireurs, and made it clear that it was the army in the home country that was capitulating, not the Netherlands as a state. The capitulation did not cover Zeeland or the forces in the colonies. Sponeck, dug in with the remnants of his division near Rotterdam, escaped captivity only thanks to the capitulation.

Zeeland

Zeeland, a province of islands and peninsulas at the mouth of the Scheldt, guarded the sea approach to Antwerp and the naval port of Vlissingen. It was defended by eight Dutch battalions under Rear Admiral Hendrik van der Stad. From 11 May two French divisions, the 60th and 68th Infantry Divisions, arrived by sea, though most of them remained south of the Western Scheldt, in Zeelandic Flanders. On 13 May the Dutch forces in Zeeland were placed under French command. Cooperation went badly: the French commander had no faith in the Dutch positions on the isthmus of South Beveland, Bath and Zanddijk, covered by inundations, and deployed his own regiments further west, on the canal crossing the peninsula and on the Sloedam causeway in front of the island of Walcheren.

When the SS regiment Deutschland reached the Bath position on 14 May, news of Winkelman’s capitulation broke the defenders’ spirit. After the first bombardment the officers abandoned their men, who fled. On 15 May, after a dive-bomber attack, the Zanddijk position was given up, and on 16 May the French and Dutch lost the canal on South Beveland. On 17 May, after a failed night attack across the Sloedam, the Germans demanded the surrender of Walcheren and, when this was refused, bombed Arnemuiden and Vlissingen and shelled Middelburg, the provincial capital, whose historic centre burned down. Around noon the Germans gained a foothold on the island. That evening the French Brigadier General Marcel Deslaurens was killed covering the evacuation of his troops from Vlissingen across the Western Scheldt. He was the only general to die in the fighting on Dutch soil in May 1940. By the end of 17 May the Germans controlled the whole of the Netherlands north of the Western Scheldt except North Beveland, which surrendered the next day.

Losses

According to Dutch calculations, cited in most studies, some 2,300 Dutch soldiers were killed in the campaign and some 7,000 wounded. More than 2,000 civilians died, most of them in Rotterdam. The French lost some 220–230 killed in the Netherlands, and the British a few dozen. German losses are estimated at some 2,000 killed and 6,000–7,000 wounded. The Dutch managed to ship between 1,200 and 1,350 German prisoners to England. The Luftwaffe’s losses were the most severe: according to various calculations it lost some 220–275 aircraft over the Netherlands, and of the roughly 430 Ju 52 transports used in the airborne assault about half were destroyed or badly damaged. The Dutch air force practically ceased to exist. Most of the navy and the huge merchant fleet, however, escaped to Britain.

Significance

The Dutch campaign showed for the first time on a large scale what airborne troops could achieve, but also how much they could lose. The landings on the bridges at Rotterdam, Dordrecht and Moerdijk decided the outcome of the campaign, because they opened the way for the tanks into the heart of the country, which the Dutch had considered inaccessible. The strike at The Hague, which was meant to end the war at a single blow, collapsed on the first day. The loss of several hundred transport aircraft weighed on the Luftwaffe in the following months, and Kesselring claimed after the war that it had weakened the air force before the Battle of Britain. The fear of paratroops and of a “fifth column” that gripped Belgium, France and Britain in May 1940 sprang largely from Dutch reports.

The bombing of Rotterdam became a symbol of Germany’s war on civilians, as Warsaw had been before it. The next day the British War Cabinet approved air attacks on industrial plants in the Ruhr, which opened the way to a years-long bombing offensive against German cities. The dispute over whether the Rotterdam raid was an attack on a defended city or a crime committed during negotiations was also argued before the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg, where Göring and Kesselring defended it as a legitimate act of war.

For the Netherlands defeat meant five years of occupation. Power passed to the German Reich Commissioner Arthur Seyss-Inquart, and more than 200,000 of the country’s inhabitants died during the war, among them more than 100,000 Dutch Jews murdered in the Holocaust. The decision of the Queen and the government to leave for London, regarded by many Dutch people in May 1940 as flight, nevertheless meant that the state did not capitulate. The Netherlands remained in the war on the Allied side with its navy, its merchant fleet and the Dutch East Indies, and its armed forces began to be rebuilt in exile. In the wider picture of the campaign in the west the Netherlands was only the northern flank. Its rapid fall exposed the Allies’ left flank in Belgium and squandered the best French reserve. Giraud’s Seventh Army, which had hurried to Breda, returned to Antwerp just as the Germans were breaking through the front on the Meuse at Sedan, where it was most needed.