The bombing of Bezuidenhout

On Saturday 3 March 1945, a few minutes after nine in the morning, British medium bombers appeared over The Hague. Their target was the Haagse Bos, an old wood in the heart of the city where German rocket units stored V-2 missiles and prepared them for launch against London. The bombs, however, fell not on the wood but on the neighbouring, densely populated residential district of Bezuidenhout. Within a few minutes some 67 tonnes of high-explosive bombs came down on the houses, and fires – which The Hague, exhausted by hunger and occupation, had nothing to fight with – consumed block after block. More than five hundred people were killed and thousands lost their homes.

Together with the bombing of Nijmegen in February 1944, the bombing of Bezuidenhout was the most tragic error committed by Allied aircraft over the occupied Netherlands, and one of the most telling examples of how the struggle against the “V” weapons struck the people of the countries from which the Germans launched them. The frequently repeated figure of 511 dead reflects early findings; later research speaks of about 530 fatalities.

Rockets from The Hague

From September 1944 The Hague was the main base from which the Germans fired V-2 rockets at England. After the loss of the French and Belgian coasts, only from the western Netherlands could they still reach London, some 320 kilometres away – almost at the limit of the missile’s range. The batteries that carried out the V-2 bombardment of England were deployed in the parks and woods of the city and its surroundings: in the Haagse Bos, at the Duindigt racecourse, on the Rust en Vreugd estate, in Wassenaar and in Scheveningen. The rocket needed no fixed launch site – firm ground and the cover of trees were enough. At night residents saw the fiery columns of missiles taking off between the houses, and those that failed fell back on the city.

The British tried to disrupt the bombardment with fighter-bomber attacks by Fighter Command. The operation, codenamed “Big Ben”, involved only a few squadrons of Spitfires, however, flying from Norfolk, some 150 kilometres from the target. The Spitfires could carry few bombs, flew only by day and were often grounded by the winter weather. Dutch sources and resistance reports judged these attacks harshly: they often hit houses and streets and rarely the rocket sites themselves. On 21 November 1944 the Dutch government-in-exile agreed to the bombing of rocket sites even near built-up areas, provided that the targets were “sufficiently identifiable”.

The bombardment did not let up. At the end of February 1945 the Germans fired seventeen rockets at England in a single day – the most of the entire campaign. Pressure within the British Cabinet to “do more” was mounting. According to the Dutch historian Carl Tinschert, author of a monograph on the raid, the Home Secretary and Minister of Home Security, Herbert Morrison, asked at a meeting on 26 January 1945 whether the need to spare the civilian population around The Hague was not being overrated. The head of Fighter Command, Roderic Hill, had been asking since the autumn for the support of the Second Tactical Air Force (2nd Tactical Air Force), which had medium bombers at its disposal. Permission to use them was given by the Allied supreme command in Europe (SHAEF); the Dutch government in London – as Tinschert stresses – was not informed of the change.

The raid

The task was given to No. 2 Group RAF, commanded by Air Vice-Marshal Basil Embry, part of Air Marshal Arthur Coningham’s Second Tactical Air Force. The order was issued on 2 March at headquarters in Brussels. Five squadrons from two wings were assigned to the attack: No. 137 Wing from the airfield at Vitry-en-Artois in northern France (No. 226 Squadron RAF and the French No. 342 “Lorraine” Squadron) and No. 139 Wing from Melsbroek (PL) near Brussels (Nos. 98 and 180 Squadrons RAF and the Dutch No. 320 Squadron). Among the airmen who bombed The Hague that day, then, were Dutchmen too. The aircraft – North American B-25 Mitchell and Douglas Boston bombers – were to strike in four waves at two aiming points in the Haagse Bos, on either side of the Laan van Nieuw Oost-Indië avenue. According to English-language accounts 51 aircraft reached the target; according to Dutch ones, 56 of the 61 that took off.

The preparations were dogged by errors from the start. The information supplied by Second Tactical Air Force headquarters was – as Tinschert has shown – incomplete: it did not clearly indicate which blocks around the wood were inhabited. The Dutch airmen doubted whether the required safety margins could be maintained when bombing from three to four kilometres up; Embry raised the question with his superiors as late as the Friday evening. The answer, which came back to him after a long journey through successive staffs, was that nobody lived around the Haagse Bos any longer. In fact Bezuidenhout had not been evacuated; on the contrary, it was overcrowded, because it housed families who had lost their homes in the bombing of Rotterdam in 1940 and people displaced from seaside Scheveningen to make way for the Atlantic Wall. People wanted by the occupiers, Jews among them, were also hiding there.

The decisive mistake was made at Vitry: when the aiming point for No. 137 Wing was plotted on the crews’ maps, the coordinates were transposed. A point that should have lain in the wood ended up in the middle of a residential district. Low cloud hung over The Hague, and the order spoke of visual aiming checked by the Gee-H radio-navigation system, which caused further confusion. The wind was blowing much harder than forecast. The first bombers passed over the city at 9.08 a.m. The crews of No. 137 Wing hit exactly where their maps told them to – Bezuidenhout, about 1.2 kilometres from the Haagse Bos. But No. 139 Wing, which had the correct coordinates, did not hit the wood either; some of its bombs fell on the city centre, including the Korte Voorhout. Not one hit the German rocket sites.

A district in flames

The high-explosive bombs destroyed houses, and the fires spread quickly through whole blocks. The Hague was unable to bring them under control. The occupiers had requisitioned a large part of the fire brigade’s equipment and taken it to Germany; many firemen had been deported for forced labour or were hiding from round-ups, and others were exhausted by the Hunger Winter. In 1945 the city brigade had only a dozen or so pumps and two turntable ladders. The bombs had damaged the water mains, so water was drawn from the canals and sewers. Petrol was in short supply – the resistance provided some 3,000 litres of “illegal” fuel, which kept the firefighting going until 2.30 a.m. Crews came to help from more than a dozen towns, from Delft and Leiden to Rotterdam, Utrecht and Zaandam; the people of neighbouring Wassenaar and Voorburg helped to put out the fires and to care for the injured.

Survivors described people fleeing who met fire whichever way they ran. The underground newspaper Trouw wrote of a city that had become a “front-line city”, bombed for more than ten days, of burning buildings and fleeing women and children, and of the V-2 rockets that took off again from among the houses that same night. The German batteries did indeed carry on: on the evening of 3 March more missiles were launched from The Hague. According to Dutch accounts, one of them came down by the Schenkweg in Bezuidenhout and killed several firemen fighting the fires left by the raid.

Casualties and destruction

Establishing the number of dead proved difficult. The district was overcrowded, some residents were not registered, and those in hiding – such as the Jewish architect Jo Limburg and his wife – lived under false names or with no papers at all. Many bodies, consumed by fire, could not be identified. In 1945 the city authorities estimated the death toll at 510; later “at least 550” was cited. Research conducted since 2016 has established the names of 531 victims; English-language accounts give the figure of 532. Among the dead was the popular poet and singer Koos Speenhoff. The number of injured ranges, depending on the source, from about 330 to more than 340.

The fires consumed more than three thousand houses; several hundred were destroyed beyond repair and more than a thousand were fit only for renovation. The number of homeless is usually estimated at about 12,000; some sources, which also count those evacuated from surrounding streets, give as many as 30,000. Many of them had to be housed in the central and eastern Netherlands – in a country already in the grip of famine. The court of appeal, the seat of the provincial government of South Holland, the Prinsesseschouwburg theatre, the Grand Hotel Paulez, five churches and nine schools were burnt out. The French embassy on the Korte Voorhout was among the buildings damaged.

Explanations

When the British realised what had happened, RAF aircraft dropped leaflets over The Hague offering condolences to the victims’ families. The Dutch authorities in London demanded answers to two questions: why they had not been warned that medium bombers would be used, and how so great an error could have occurred. From the outset Coningham attributed the disaster to a strong northerly wind that had supposedly carried the bombs southwards. The Deputy Chief of the Air Staff, Norman Bottomley, rejected the Dutch complaints, pointing out that the Haagse Bos had been on the target list since November 1944. The Chief of the Air Staff, Charles Portal, and the Secretary of State for Air, Archibald Sinclair, did not believe the “wind explanation” – the error was too large – but according to Tinschert it was precisely this version that was passed on on 19 March to the Dutch ambassador, Edgar Michiels van Verduynen. At the same time the further use of medium bombers against targets in The Hague was forbidden.

Winston Churchill, who had for months been pressing for more effective action against the V-2, also addressed the matter. In a statement to the Dutch he wrote of a “terrible disaster”, promised a thorough inquiry and disciplinary action against those responsible, and expressed the “deepest regret” of the British people and the RAF. The final reply, which the ambassador did not receive until early July 1945, attributed the disaster chiefly to the error of the officer who had prepared the data for the crews. The true course of events – the transposed coordinates at Vitry and the gap in the flow of information between staffs – was described in detail only by Dutch historians working from British archives declassified years later.

The Bezuidenhout tragedy was not the first of its kind in the Netherlands. As early as October 1944, during Operation Infatuate, RAF Bomber Command had breached the dykes of the island of Walcheren to flood the German fortifications guarding the approach to Antwerp – again without warning the Dutch government.

A city between rockets and hunger

The raid struck a city that was already utterly exhausted. Since September 1944, when after the Dutch railway strike Reich Commissioner Arthur Seyss-Inquart had halted food supplies to the western provinces, The Hague, Rotterdam and Amsterdam had been living through the Hunger Winter. Rations fell below 500 calories a day; people ate tulip bulbs and chopped down trees and the timber of abandoned houses for fuel. The front had come to a halt on the great rivers – the south of the country had already been liberated by the British and the Canadians, but the western Netherlands remained under occupation. The people of The Hague were caught in a trap: on one side German rockets taking off from among their homes, on the other Allied aircraft trying to destroy those rockets.

The raid itself achieved nothing militarily. The German batteries went on firing. The bombardment of England ceased only at the end of March 1945, when Allied advances on the Western Front forced the rocket units to withdraw from the Netherlands: the last V-2 fell on England on 27 March. In all, more than a thousand rockets fell on London and other English towns, killing about 2,700 people – while in the Netherlands itself faulty and stray missiles, together with Allied raids on the rocket sites, cost the lives of hundreds of civilians.

Remembrance

For years the people of Bezuidenhout felt that their tragedy had been pushed to the margins: the British never fully admitted the error, and in the post-war narrative of liberation it was hard to speak of the victims of Allied bombs. The district was not rebuilt in its former shape – new housing went up where the burnt-out blocks had stood, and later office blocks and ministry buildings. Since 1951 a memorial to the victims has stood in the cemetery on the Kerkhoflaan. In 1991 the Monument to Human Error (Monument van de menselijke vergissing) was unveiled by the bridge over the Schenk canal, on the Laan van Nieuw Oost-Indië. Every year, on the first Sunday after 3 March, The Hague remembers the dead with a service, the laying of wreaths and a concert at the Royal Conservatoire; the ceremonies are attended by the mayors of The Hague and of neighbouring Wassenaar and Leidschendam-Voorburg, whose inhabitants brought help in 1945.

Significance

The bombing of Bezuidenhout is among the best-known examples of the “bombing by mistake” that struck the people of occupied countries – the Netherlands, Belgium, France and Denmark – in the last year of the war. It showed how limited air power was against mobile rocket weapons hidden among buildings, and how easily political pressure to “do something” led to the relaxation of the rules protecting civilians. For the Dutch, who at that very moment were dying of hunger and waiting for liberation, it was a particularly bitter experience. The Hague gained its freedom only after the surrender of the German forces in the Netherlands in May 1945, a few days after Allied aircraft had begun dropping over the western Netherlands not bombs but food.