Five Brothers and a War

Impact of Southern Liberation

General Smith did become extremely involved in the matter of the Dutch starvation. Huge stockpiles of food were being accumulated in England. Ships to carry that food were identified. But Smith was also developing a contingency plan that he let few people know about—and if he ever told Gerbrandy, there was never a hint that he found out. The thought was to evacuate Western Holland, en masse . The plan suggested moving the Dutch to England, Belgium and France as refugees until Holland could be rebuilt enough to let them back. While fantastic in its scope, Smith recognized that the Germans would likely engage in a “scorched Earth” tactic in their exit or defeat in Western Holland. He had a good reason for doing so, and in point of fact, Hitler ordered that exact situation, where dykes would be destroyed, thereby flooding much of the country, and where ports would be blown up to prevent their use by the Allies. This had an important impact on the Allies plans for Dutch liberation, and it was the major reason why they did not attack the heartland of Holland during the last weeks of the war. The Allies calculated that it was unnecessary to destroy Holland in order to gain a few weeks—and they also did not wish to sacrifice the lives of their own soldiers or the Dutch populace to gain those few weeks. Of course, the Dutch were dying in ever-increasing numbers as the famine became more acute, and it was the combination of all of these forces that led to the negotiations in Achterveld to allow the Allies to airlift and then airdrop food into German-controlled territory.

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Five Brothers and a War

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