Armageddon - Max Hastings [306]
Medical research suggested that children aged between ten and fourteen suffered most from hunger. The average Dutch fourteen-year-old boy weighed forty-one kilos in 1940, but only thirty-seven kilos in 1945, and had become two centimetres shorter. Girls of the same age were a frightening seven kilos lighter and six centimetres shorter. Typhoid and diphtheria epidemics had broken out. Women stopped menstruating. Men became temporarily impotent. Corpses lay in churches awaiting burial. An Amsterdam old people’s home reported that its death rate had doubled. A visitor to a cemetery wrote: “the shrunken bodies were lying next to each other. No flesh on thighs or calves. Most had bent arms and legs, the hands clenched as if the poor devil was still asking for food.” On 17 March, a Dutch leader sent a new appeal to London for aid: “The expression ‘starved to death’ has been used so often in a figurative sense that it is difficult to realise that people are dying in the street . . . And when the question arises: ‘But how can people stand it?,’ my answer is: ‘Those people cannot stand it; they are really going completely to pieces.’ ”
All these miseries were compounded by Allied bombing. Bertha Schonfeld felt irrationally safe at home, and simply buried her head in her hands as bombs fell close at hand. Rather than go down to a shelter, she and her mother protected themselves by putting saucepans on their heads. Once, a neighbour found a spent cannon shell in her bed. The Germans were launching V2 rockets against Britain from Holland. They had deliberately located launch and storage sites near to built-up areas. All the windows in the Schonfelds’ apartment were broken by the premature explosion of some of the forty-five-foot monsters. V2s killed 2,724 British people in the last months of the war. The Allied air forces strove to frustrate them, and killed far more people doing so than did the V2s. On Saturday 3 March, fifty-seven Boston and Mitchell bombers of the RAF’s Second Tactical Air Force, aiming at launch sites on the Haagsche Bosch near the Hague, instead plastered a residential area. The Germans refused to allow the fire brigade to enter the stricken streets, asserting that “the stupid Dutch have to learn what it is like.” The raid killed 511 people and destroyed 3,250 houses, one of them the home of the local Resistance leader Henri Koot, who lost everything he owned. Twelve thousand desperately cold and hungry people now also found themselves without shelter. Churchill was infuriated by “this slaughter of the Dutch.” The British Foreign Office told the Dutch ambassador that the responsible officer had been court-martialled, for confusing the vertical and horizontal co-ordinates of the target. In fact, there is no evidence that anyone was disciplined for the tragedy, but rumour within the RAF suggested that there had been a disastrous bomb-aiming error. Other raids involved less dramatic blunders, but inflicted a steady stream of civilian casualties. Misdirected Allied bombs caused the deaths of substantially more people in the nations of occupied Europe than the Luftwaffe killed in its blitz on Britain.
Dutch bitterness towards the Allies, as well as against the Germans, had become very great. Antoinette Hamminga, a teenager living near the Hague, suffered no subsequent trauma about the months of starvation, but retained terrifying memories of her experience as a passenger on a train strafed by British fighter-bombers, when a girl sitting behind her was killed and another was drenched in the blood of a wounded woman. “People got very angry,” said Theodore Wempe. “We constantly asked each other: ‘Why don’t they come? Will it be a couple of days? Or a week?’ ” Churchill spoke to the House of Commons on 14 March about the plight of Holland, but as late as the 27th Eisenhower asserted in response