# what if the lowlands not neutral?



## Marcel (Oct 2, 2017)

I know some of you like to do some mind games with alternatives in ww2.

There is this thread about an American expeditional force in 1939 and it got me thinking.

The Netherlands has been anti military and anti war for many years before ww2. Apart from that, there was quite a lot of confidence in the country's natural defenses. As we have seen this was not justified, as the Germans broke the defense in only 5 days. So I was wondering, what if the Dutch and the Belgians would have sided with the French and the British?

The situation would have been quite different as it was now:

Cooperation between The Netherlands, Belgium, France and Great Britain would have been much smoother. 

The French army could have prepaired and occupied positions way up north, closing off the road into France.
Germany would have had to defend a much larger
Germany's west border would have been much more vulnerable during the attack on Poland, giving the allies much more opportunity to attack over a wide front on a virtual unprotected ground north of the Siegfried line, while the German army was occuupied in the east.
So what do you think, did the neutrality of Belgium and The Netherlands seal France's fate? Would Germany even have attacked in that situation? Or did it just not matter?


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## The Basket (Oct 2, 2017)

Don't think it mattered as the military forces of Holland and Belgium and Denmark included was not large enough.
The only thing that could have mattered was if British and French forces were on Dutch soil in large numbers. And wouldn't have been neutral but highly belligerent. 
Odd that ww1 they went through Belgium so maybe than ww2 might just go same way. 
Holland was originally part of the Schieffen plan but the Germans copped out in ww1. In my view it was very naïve of Holland and Belgium to think they could stay neutral.


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## pbehn (Oct 2, 2017)

The Basket said:


> . In my view it was very naïve of Holland and Belgium to think they could stay neutral.


Belgium as a state was neutral from its creation, its Neutrality was enshrined in the 1839 Treaty of London, If Belgium wasnt neutral it would either be on one side or the other in any Franco German rivalry. Since its neutrality was guaranteed by treaty an invasion of it is a declaration of war against the parties giving the guarantee.

On my first day in Belgium a lady told be that "Belgium was created by the British" which is a bit of a twist of history. Unlike most countries with a constitutional monarchy the monarch is not the king of Belgium but king of "The Belgians".


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## pbehn (Oct 2, 2017)

The neutrality of Belgiums constitution meant that the Maginot line was rendered useless. Building it with Belgium behind it would violate neutrality and building it with Belgium on the outside abandoned Frances guarantee to Belgium.


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## The Basket (Oct 2, 2017)

Neutrality didn't help in 1914....or 1940.
So pattern emerging.
When the Fox hears the Rabbit scream he comes a-runnin', but not to help.
Trusting Hitler in 1940 was bad juju so when Hitler invaded Denmark after signing a non aggression pact then neutral means zip.


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## swampyankee (Oct 2, 2017)

pbehn said:


> Belgium as a state was neutral from its creation, its Neutrality was enshrined in the 1839 Treaty of London, If Belgium wasnt neutral it would either be on one side or the other in any Franco German rivalry. Since its neutrality was guaranteed by treaty an invasion of it is a declaration of war against the parties giving the guarantee.
> 
> On my first day in Belgium a lady told be that "Belgium was created by the British" which is a bit of a twist of history. Unlike most countries with a constitutional monarchy the monarch is not the king of Belgium but king of "The Belgians".



I would think the German invasion of Belgium in 1914 made its permanent neutrality moot. 

Belgian had and has some rather serious internal divisions: an alliance with France may have torn the country apart


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## pbehn (Oct 2, 2017)

The Basket said:


> Neutrality didn't help in 1914....or 1940.
> So pattern emerging.
> When the Fox hears the Rabbit scream he comes a-runnin', but not to help.
> Trusting Hitler in 1940 was bad juju so when Hitler invaded Denmark after signing a non aggression pact then neutral means zip.


I agree completely The Basket, I was just saying that Belgiums neutrality wasn't a whim of the people it was a political fact and as you say, actually a problem. As a neutral nation it couldn't arm itself without provoking someone else by taking sides.


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## pbehn (Oct 2, 2017)

swampyankee said:


> I would think the German invasion of Belgium in 1914 made its permanent neutrality moot.
> 
> Belgian had and has some rather serious internal divisions: an alliance with France may have torn the country apart


Completely true SW, in those two statements you explain why Belgium as a state had to be neutral with its neutrality guaranteed. If it had its own military forces open to political influence they would be an enemy or friend of either Germany or France. Belgium was supported as a buffer zone.


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## The Basket (Oct 2, 2017)

Holland was neutral in ww1 and so was Denmark.
Maybe same trick twice?
I dunno. I am trying to find why Holland was avoided in the original Schieffen plan.
If anyone know that would be grand.


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## pbehn (Oct 2, 2017)

The Basket said:


> Holland was neutral in ww1 and so was Denmark.
> Maybe same trick twice?
> I dunno. I am trying to find why Holland was avoided in the original Schieffen plan.
> If anyone know that would be grand.


That is a complex question, for example Fokker is a Dutch company founded by a Dutchman but only moved to the Netherlands in 1919. Also very important to note that the Netherlands are much bigger than they used to be , with about 26% of its area and 21% of its population located below sea level, and only about 50% of its land exceeding one metres above sea level.


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## Shortround6 (Oct 2, 2017)

Sometimes neutrality works if the country in question is more trouble to take over than it is worth, either in raw materials or as a path to get somewhere else. Neutrality has worked for both Sweden and Switzerland but then both had relatively strong militaries, not much for resources (Swedish Iron ore excepted) and didn't happen to be an obstacle separating two warring countries. 
You also have world opinion. Switzerland and Sweden hadn't been in a war in about a century in 1914 so most people might believe they would _stay _neutral. Neither was a colonial power either.

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## The Basket (Oct 2, 2017)

Holland suffered during ww1 so even been a non combatant neutral ain't no sunshine.
The UK occupied Iceland during ww2 although it was very nice and gentlemanly.
And the invasion of Norway always is fun for a who did what first kinda way.
As Shortround said... neutrality is in the eye of the beholder. And since those eyes were Hitler and Stalin then you're stuffed.
Spain was in my view the most important neutral country. Could have been a sticky wicket in Madrid joined the Axis in 1940.


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## swampyankee (Oct 2, 2017)

Ireland's neutrality was not that comfy -- they lost merchant ships and fishermen to U-boats and mines, were [probably] accidentally bombed, had citizens lose their lives to loose mines, and had a significant number of interned Axis soldiers to feed and house.


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## Shortround6 (Oct 2, 2017)

I am not sure what Spain brings to the table. 
It was pretty chewed up by the civil war and not particularly industrialized. Yes they had a small arms industry but not really much in the way of an auto industry (in terms of tens or hundreds of thousands of vehicles per year)
Air craft industry was also small, pretty much branch of Hispano Suiza (also factories in France and Switzerland but production capability was ???) I don't know if Spain was a food importer or exporter at the time. 
Pool of manpower?

It had a strategic location for threatening the British trade routes but how was that to be capitalized on? 

Was what Spain could bring to the table worth hundreds of miles more of "Atlantic Wall" or German help in defending Spain from British attacks?


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## The Basket (Oct 3, 2017)

Spain offered new u boat bases but if Gibraltar fell in 1940 then the shock of that loss could be catastrophic.


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## swampyankee (Oct 3, 2017)

The Basket said:


> Spain offered new u boat bases but if Gibraltar fell in 1940 then the shock of that loss could be catastrophic.


Retaining Gibraltar would be more important than Malta. Spain had also just finished a close-run civil war. Franco was still eliminating his opposition; he wouldn’t be able to trust a big enough army to matter


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## Shortround6 (Oct 3, 2017)

Spain may offer harbors that can be turned into bases but then those bases have to be built and then defended. The Spanish Navy only had two bases on the Atlantic coast. Ferrol on the north east 'corner' and Cadiz which is less than 50 miles from Gibraltar. 
You need AA guns and several squadrons of fighters at the least.


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## pbehn (Oct 3, 2017)

Marcel said:


> I know some of younlime to do some mind games with alternatives in ww2.
> 
> There is this thread about an American expeditional force in 1939 and it got me thinking.
> 
> ...


I don't know that the Netherlands were any more military or anti military than the uk between the wars. The UK did nothing about Czechoslovakia because it couldn't at the time but it could re arm. Were the Netherlands constitutionally neutral at the time? Perhaps if both countries believed in armed neutrality things would have been different however driving an army through Switzerland is a much tougher task than across Belgium and the Netherlands. Please remember that even in UK in the pre war years Churchill was viewed as a bit of a warmongering nut case and as late as 1940 there were British politicians wanting to sue for peace with Adolf.

Did the Netherlands have any scope for armed neutrality? From the many times I crossed the German Netherlands border the only telling feature was a sign on the road, there are no real geographical features to defend.


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## swampyankee (Oct 3, 2017)

The Netherlands is flat. Also, for at least a century, the Netherlands' defense spending, from what I'v, outside of the Dutch East Indies, is probably best described as "penurious." I think part of it was simply because they were near two of the three most powerful armies on the Continent.

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## Marcel (Oct 4, 2017)

pbehn said:


> I don't know that the Netherlands were any more military or anti military than the uk between the wars. The UK did nothing about Czechoslovakia because it couldn't at the time but it could re arm. Were the Netherlands constitutionally neutral at the time? Perhaps if both countries believed in armed neutrality things would have been different however driving an army through Switzerland is a much tougher task than across Belgium and the Netherlands. Please remember that even in UK in the pre war years Churchill was viewed as a bit of a warmongering nut case and as late as 1940 there were British politicians wanting to sue for peace with Adolf.
> 
> Did the Netherlands have any scope for armed neutrality? From the many times I crossed the German Netherlands border the only telling feature was a sign on the road, there are no real geographical features to defend.


The Dutch believed naively that water would be their strong defense. Large area in front of the Grebbe line and the New Water line could be flooded, which they thought would stop an enemy from entering Holland, which is the western part of the Netherlands. They were convinced that"tanks would still into the soft, wet soil". Very naive of course as they did not include modern weapons in t thinking, like aircraft.


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## parsifal (Oct 4, 2017)

Allies in their pre-war planning did not expect the germans to attack the Netherlands. they had developed two plans with regard to Belgium, Plan E , which was an advance to the Escaut and the more ambitious Plan d, onto which they grafted the socalled 'breda variant" in which girauds mobile 7th army would advance to assist the dutch.

All of the French plans fell apart because of Belgiums and Dutch neutrality, and because they grossly under-estimated the speed of the Germans attacks. Had they been able to advance before the fighting got under way, the French could have entrenched within the ardenne 9where they would be protected better from armour and air attack, linked up with the defenders at liege, Namur and other points along the frontier and assisted the dutch in the defence of their country. The Dutch if they joined the allies early would almost certainly have flooded their canals and dykes well in advance of a german attack.

The French have often been criticized for their essentially defensive approaches, but this is a massive piece of misinformation. in fact the French hope to fight a decisive battle on their terms al la Foch style in april 1918. They kinda soughta were doing thet at gembloux and Hannut before being defeated and outflanked further south. The French could win a set piece battle against the germans, and a prewar entry by the Belgians and the Dutch would have assisted in that .

The attached article might be of assistance and interest in this matter

https://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/reports/2006/R3281.pdf

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## The Basket (Oct 4, 2017)

That Mr Hitler offered German troops to take Gibraltar.
Also the Canaries would have been a base.


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## pbehn (Oct 4, 2017)

The problem for Germany was that even if a neutral country didn't resist to any great extent it took manpower it didn't have just to provide a garrison. Despite taking control of most of Western Europe it had to spend huge resources trying to get and keep control of it. Places like North Africa, Greece Malta Crete even the Channel Islands required men to take or keep hold of.


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## pbehn (Oct 4, 2017)

Marcel said:


> The Dutch believed naively that water would be their strong defense. Large area in front of the Grebbe line and the New Water line could be flooded, which they thought would stop an enemy from entering Holland, which is the western part of the Netherlands. They were convinced that"tanks would still into the soft, wet soil". Very naive of course as they did not include modern weapons in t thinking, like aircraft.


Maybe they were fighting the last war not the next, I remember reading about a British force long ago dying of disease trapped behind flooded fields in the Netherlands. As I understand it to defeat the Blitzkrieg one thing you need is space, the Kursk salient was about 210 m across and Russian defensive lines behind it were even bigger.


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## Marcel (Oct 4, 2017)

pbehn said:


> Maybe they were fighting the last war not the next, I remember reading about a British force long ago dying of disease trapped behind flooded fields in the Netherlands. As I understand it to defeat the Blitzkrieg one thing you need is space, the Kursk salient was about 210 m across and Russian defensive lines behind it were even bigger.


Not even the last one, but the one before that. Last war that the Dutch were involved in was the Belgian campaign in 1830. But remember, the Blitz krieg was not totally accepted in 1940, it was a surprise to most of the countries.


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## pbehn (Oct 4, 2017)

Marcel said:


> Not even the last one, but the one before that. Last war that the Dutch were involved in was the Belgian campaign in 1830. But remember, the Blitz krieg was not totally accepted in 1940, it was a surprise to most of the countries.


It was a surprise to the British which is also a surprise because it is much like what they did in WW1 and were planning to do themselves.


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## Shortround6 (Oct 4, 2017)

Yes and No the the Surprise.

Many countries were trying to figure out how to bring mobility back the battlefield after the siege warfare conditions of WW I. So that is not a surprise. Using armor to punch holes in a line and then penetrate and attack rear areas was a pretty standard goal. The Surprise was how far and fast the Germans were prepared to penetrate and how well coordinated they were.
If you are going to penetrate more than 5-10 miles you need to bring your artillery with you. You need artillery that can be set up fast, this is as much or more training than features of the artillery pieces and tow vehicles (although horses are not going to keep up with tanks). The artillery has to be able to pick out firing sites, survey them (accurate placement on map) and set up the communications network before they can fire the first shot. German tactical air helped but usually gets too much credit. 
Other armies may have talked about penetrating and shooting up rear areas (cavalry had been doing that for centuries) but if the intermediate goals include stopping and consolidating every few miles of advance and you don't have a good communications network, messengers, carrier pigeons and signal flags won't work then the advance stalls out fairly quickly regardless of what kind of gun your tank has or how fast it can drive down a road.

The British may have talked a good game about "fleets" of tanks swanning about the battlefield but without HE and smoke support (let alone infantry) while it may have looked good on the Salisbury Plain in demonstrations, it failed in the close countryside of Northern France.


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## pbehn (Oct 4, 2017)

Shortround6 said:


> Yes and No the the Surprise.
> 
> Many countries were trying to figure out how to bring mobility back the battlefield after the siege warfare conditions of WW I. So that is not a surprise. Using armor to punch holes in a line and then penetrate and attack rear areas was a pretty standard goal. The Surprise was how far and fast the Germans were prepared to penetrate and how well coordinated they were.
> If you are going to penetrate more than 5-10 miles you need to bring your artillery with you. You need artillery that can be set up fast, this is a much or more training that features of the artillery pieces and tow vehicles (although horses are not going to keep up with tanks). The artillery has to be able to pick out firing sites, survey them (accurate placement on map) and set up the communications network before they can fire the first shot. German tactical air helped but usually gets too much credit.
> ...


Great post SR, no army is ever as good as its promo videos but while the army were using messengers and semaphore the air force of the same had constructed a network covering the whole of Great Britain where every combatant was a trained pilot with a radio and an aeroplane. While on the ground there was a nationwide network of RADAR operators and ROC observers. The army had no excuse in either attack or defence.


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## swampyankee (Oct 4, 2017)

The Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, and Denmark were basically screwed regardless of what they did: they were too small to support armed forces capable of resisting either Germany or France, even collectively. Belgium had -- and has -- some pretty severe internal divisions, and a formal military alliance with France or Germany could tear the country apart.


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## pbehn (Oct 4, 2017)

swampyankee said:


> The Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, and Denmark were basically screwed regardless of what they did: they were too small to support armed forces capable of resisting either Germany or France, even collectively. Belgium had -- and has -- some pretty severe internal divisions, and a formal military alliance with France or Germany could tear the country apart.


I agree, if all of low countries or Benelux as they now are were a single entity with present day France at the time, the sensible course would be to remove civilians and turn the whole are into a militarized collapsing defensive zone, however that is only acceptable when war is declared or completely certain.


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## parsifal (Oct 4, 2017)

swampyankee said:


> The Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, and Denmark were basically screwed regardless of what they did: they were too small to support armed forces capable of resisting either Germany or France, even collectively. Belgium had -- and has -- some pretty severe internal divisions, and a formal military alliance with France or Germany could tear the country apart.



You could say that about a lot of small countries, like Finland and Switzerland, both of which were at different times in the firing line of nations much bigger and stronger than they. Sweden too came close to being overwhelmed by Germany, and at one stage even Britain and France were on the verge of overt aggression to the Swedes.

It is in the nature of small nations that they would be highly subject to the whims of their larger neighbours, but only a few leaders took the view that small nations had to bow to the bidding of their larger neighbours. Hitler was one of them. He believed it Germany’s right to bully and cajole any smaller neighbour, that might was right and the rule of law counted for nothing.

The democracies had power to exercise similar disdain to the wishes of the neutrals but like most nations, were far more observant of the rules of law, respect of the wishes of the neutrals even to the point where it affected their own chances of survival

In the case of the Netherlands, she had pursued a policy of neutrality since 1830 which had been respected during WWI. She expected the same would happen for WWII. Very nearly this was the case, but at the last minute the Germans decided to include the conquest of Holland as part of fall gelb

Belgium had entered into a mutual defence arrangement with France in 1920, and despite having been virtually overrun in WWI, had continued to fight alongside the allies for an extended period. That the Belgians were permitted to abandon that treaty in 1936 by their own free will, disproves in spades the theory you are suggesting that small nations were the plaything of larger nations at every juncture.

Successful pursuit of true neutrality is difficult and requires the expenditure of more resources on defence, not less, This was the undoing of the interwar neutrals. They put too much faith in the League of Nations and not enough dollars into defence. Both Belgium and Holland had, in their own right, the potential economically to have major impact on military operations. History shows us that the Belgians fielded more than 20 divisions for the campaign, the dutch the equivalent of 13. Collectively, with about 35 divs available, had those formations been adequately trained and equipped, they could have mounted a very effective defence. As it was, strung out too thinly, not mobile enough and lacking adequate AA and AT defences, with unmodernised fortifications and manpower not well trained enough in the modern application of warfarer, they were torn apart fairly easily. This did not have to be the case, but their leaders neeed to spend more on defence in order to achieve that outcome.


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## Kevin Barclay-Jay (Oct 9, 2017)

1n 1939 Belgium forbade British and French troops to cross the boarder or enter Belgium territory. If they had been our Ally and allowed this to happen then the Germans would not have had the time to build up sufficient numbers for the Invasion Of France. RAF vases could have been further forward and the whole structure of the was could have been different... as it the 3 months Belgium held the Allies, let the Germans gain the time they needed


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## grunnvms (Oct 9, 2017)

The Dutch army was actually far more successful than people think, and was anticipated by the Germans. The Germans expected to take the Netherlands in one or two days, but it took them four days, and only after Rotterdam was bombed the Netherlands surrendered. The Dutch destroyed far over 300 German aircraft, among them over 200 German Ju52 transport aircraft (about about a third of their transport fleet). The German paratroopers that landed near The Hague to capture the government and the queen, were effectively beaten. Don't forget that the Dutch hadn't been in a war since Napoleon.


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