Operations Manna and Chowhound

On Sunday 29 April 1945 British Avro Lancaster bombers flew over The Hague at a height of a few hundred metres. Instead of bombs they carried sacks of flour, tinned food, chocolate and biscuits. Over the Duindigt racecourse they opened their bomb bays and dropped their loads straight onto the ground, without parachutes. So began Operation Manna, named after the biblical bread from heaven, in which the British air force and its allies spent nine days delivering food to the western Netherlands, still occupied by the Germans. On 1 May they were joined by American B-17s in Operation Chowhound. Both operations were made possible by an unwritten, and later agreed, ceasefire with the occupiers: German anti-aircraft guns, which only a few days earlier had been firing at the same aircraft, were to stay silent.

Popular accounts state that on 29 April both operations began under a truce concluded with the German occupying forces. This is a simplification. The first flights on 29 April took place before the Germans had formally agreed to air corridors and drop zones, and the American Operation Chowhound began only on 1 May, because until then the weather over the airfields in England had made it impossible.

The Hunger Winter

The western provinces of the Netherlands, with Amsterdam, Rotterdam, The Hague and Utrecht, had been under occupation since May 1940. After the failure of the Allied airborne operation at Arnhem in September 1944 the front came to a halt on the great rivers, and for more than three million people in the west of the country liberation receded by many months. At the call of the government-in-exile in London, Dutch railwaymen began a strike on 17 September intended to assist the Allied advance. Reich Commissioner Arthur Seyss-Inquart responded by halting food shipments from the agricultural east to the cities in the west. When in November he partially allowed transport by barge, the canals were already frozen by an exceptionally harsh winter, and the Germans had requisitioned a large proportion of the barges, lorries and fuel.

So began the Hunger Winter, in Dutch Hongerwinter. Official food rations in the cities of the west fell below a thousand calories a day during the winter, and by the end of April 1945, according to American and Dutch studies, to about 400 calories – in practice two slices of bread and a bowl of watery soup a day. People ate tulip bulbs and sugar beet and burned furniture, floorboards and timber from dismantled houses in their stoves. Tens of thousands set out on foot or on bicycles without tyres for the countryside to barter clothes and jewellery for food. According to the most frequently cited estimates, some 20,000 people died of hunger and its effects, above all the elderly, especially men, but also children and the sick; many more suffered from hunger oedema and diseases of malnutrition.

Help from outside was modest. From January and February 1945 ships of the Swedish Red Cross and of Swiss relief began arriving in Dutch ports with flour and margarine; this flour was used to bake what later became the famous “Swedish white bread”. Yet it added only a few hundred calories a day. For a long time the Allied leaders were unwilling to drop food, fearing that the Germans would seize it, and the Netherlands itself was not a military priority for them. Canadian troops, which had been fighting in the south of the country since the autumn of 1944, were liberating the east and north of the Netherlands in April 1945, but the west, shielded by the Germans’ Grebbe Line and the threat of flooding the polders, remained beyond their reach.

Negotiating with the occupier

The threat of flooding was real. On 17 April 1945 the Germans blew up the dyke protecting the Wieringermeer polder in the north of the country and flooded the entire polder, about two hundred square kilometres of farmland. Had the same fate befallen the polder land around the great cities, much of it below sea level, the consequences would have been catastrophic. Seyss-Inquart, who knew the war was lost and was looking for a way out for himself, began from early April to signal to the Dutch officials responsible for food supply that he was ready to talk. On 12 April he agreed in principle that if the Allies halted on the Grebbe Line, he would not obstruct the delivery of food to the occupied west.

In London the prime minister of the government-in-exile, Pieter Sjoerds Gerbrandy, lobbied Winston Churchill, while Prince Bernhard, son-in-law of Queen Wilhelmina and commander of the Dutch armed forces, lobbied the Supreme Allied Commander, General Dwight Eisenhower. On 23 April the British and American governments authorised Eisenhower to prepare a relief operation; he entrusted its planning to the British Air Commodore Andrew Geddes. At the same time Eisenhower warned the German command that anyone who added to the sufferings of the Dutch, for example by flooding the country, would be held to account after the war.

From 26 April Seyss-Inquart agreed to the drops, and at the end of the month, in the village of Achterveld on the front line in the part of the country liberated by the Canadians, Allied and German officers worked out the details: flight corridors, altitudes, times and drop zones. On 30 April Seyss-Inquart himself came there and met Eisenhower’s chief of staff, General Walter Bedell Smith, in the presence of Prince Bernhard and a Soviet representative. It was agreed that aircraft carrying food would fly unmolested in designated corridors and that the Germans would not interfere with its distribution. Bedell Smith also proposed to Seyss-Inquart the surrender of the German forces in the Netherlands; the Reich Commissioner refused, pleading the lack of an order from Berlin. On 1 May the commander of I Canadian Corps, General Charles Foulkes, agreed a ceasefire with the Germans on the road and railway from Arnhem to Utrecht, along which columns of lorries were to pass.

Bread from heaven

Geddes concluded that air drops were the only quick solution. There were not enough parachutes, and landing at Dutch airfields, wrecked by Allied bombing, was out of the question. Trials with sandbags showed that a load dropped without a parachute would survive hitting the ground if the aircraft flew very slowly and low, at a height of about 120–150 metres. That meant flying only by day, just above the rooftops and within range of every German machine gun.

On the morning of 29 April, before the Germans had given formal consent, two Lancasters took off on a trial flight; one of them, with a mostly Canadian crew, was named “Bad Penny”. They dropped food over the Duindigt racecourse near The Hague and returned unscathed. In the afternoon, announced by the BBC, the first wave arrived over the Netherlands: according to British figures about 240 Lancasters, which dropped more than 500 tons of food. Airmen remembered German anti-aircraft guns whose barrels tracked the passing aircraft, and crowds of people waving sheets, flags and handkerchiefs from roofs, streets and fields. On the drop zones the Germans laid out white sheets as markers, and their soldiers checked that the sacks contained no weapons.

Drop zones were designated around The Hague (the Duindigt racecourse and Ypenburg airfield), Leiden and Katwijk (Valkenburg airfield), Rotterdam (Waalhaven airfield and the area around the Kralingse Plas lake) and Gouda; the Americans also dropped food on Schiphol airfield near Amsterdam. Collection and distribution were organised by Dutch committees set up by Prince Bernhard at Geddes’s request. Despite fears of chaos when thousands of hungry people rushed onto the drop zones, the food was gathered and taken to warehouses in a surprisingly disciplined manner.

In Operation Manna, conducted by Arthur Harris’s RAF Bomber Command until 7 May, with individual flights continuing until 8 May, about 3,300 sorties were flown by Lancasters and Mosquitoes according to British figures, and more than 7,000 tons of food were dropped. British, Australian, Canadian, New Zealand and Polish crews took part. The Polish No. 300 Squadron, flying Lancasters from Faldingworth, took part in drops over Gouda and Rotterdam among other places; only a few days earlier the same crews had been bombing the Berchtesgaden area.

Chowhound and Faust

The American Operation Chowhound began on 1 May. By 8 May ten bomb groups of the 3rd Air Division of the Eighth Air Force had flown, according to American figures, about 2,270 B-17 sorties and dropped some 3,800–4,000 tons of food, much of it US Army field rations. Heavy cartons falling from the sky were dangerous for people on the ground, and individual German soldiers, unaware of the orders or opposed to them, sometimes fired at the low-flying bombers, though without serious consequences. Altogether the two operations delivered about 11,000 tons of food by air.

On 2 May, under the agreement reached the day before by General Foulkes, the land operation Faust began. Several hundred Canadian lorries crossed the front line near Rhenen and by 9 May had carried nearly 7,000 tons of food into the occupied west. According to later calculations the drops provided the inhabitants of the starving area with about three kilograms of food per person, and the Faust convoys with about two more. It was not much, but it arrived just when, on 1 May, the Dutch food supply offices had declared that they had nothing left to distribute. Large-scale distribution began only around 10 May, after liberation; by the end of May rations for adults already exceeded 2,000 calories a day.

Place in the war

Manna and Chowhound began as the Reich was falling apart: on that same day, 29 April, the Americans liberated Dachau, and at Caserta the surrender of the German forces in Italy was signed. On 4 May, as part of the surrender accepted by Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery at Lüneburg, the German forces in the Netherlands also surrendered; on 5 May their commander, Colonel General Johannes Blaskowitz, agreed the details of the surrender with General Foulkes at Wageningen. The western Netherlands was the last part of the country to be liberated. Seyss-Inquart was arrested a few days later, and at Nuremberg he was sentenced to death for, among other things, deportations, the shooting of hostages and the persecution of the Dutch Jews. His defence argued that at the end of the war he had not carried out orders to destroy the country and had agreed to the food relief, but given the weight of the other charges this did not save him from the sentence.

For the Dutch, the drops became one of the most enduring memories of the end of the war. Bombers which for years had flown over the country on their way to Germany, and which in March had mistakenly bombed The Hague’s Bezuidenhout district, for the first time brought something other than destruction. For the Allies it was one of the first large-scale humanitarian relief operations conducted from the air, and the experience of Chowhound was put to use three years later during the Berlin Blockade, when American and British aircraft supplied the cut-off western sectors of the city for almost a year. The Hunger Winter also left a mark that doctors are still studying today: children conceived and born during the famine fell ill in adult life more often than their peers, which made the Dutch famine one of the most important sources of knowledge about the effects of foetal malnutrition on health.