Recent content by fass

(Conclusion) Permanent effect? In how far did the war permanently affect us? Especially: how did it affect my generation, children being supposed to be particularly sensitive to trauma? ( Note that I emphatically exclude here those who suffered personal losses or were persecuted! Only...

Start, part 14 The war ends In the very last week of the war, some German soldiers settled in the yard and in the kitchen, where they started eating bread and large lumps of cheese. My mother could not refrain from commenting that the food actually belonged to us, and as this sounds pretty...

Start, part 13 The nadir Until the end of 1944 the general situation was still barely tolerable, but then it became critical . The Ardennes offensive (“Battle of the Bulge”) around Christmas led to widespread despair, nobody expected this to be still within the German capabilities. For...

@ Soundbreaker Welch?: Just as an aside, and irrelevant to the story itself: the Bezuidenhout was not a village, but a rather large and prestigious residential quarter of the city of The Hague. That's where I lived before we had to move from The Hague in 1942. Indeed it seems that there was...

@ Graugeist: Thanks for your comments, I’m happy to share my cobwebs with you all and find that people are interested. I have occasionally considered publishing them as a book, but decided against it for several reasons. I have written two books on subjects very different from WW2 matters...

Start, part 12 Robot war The winter of 1944-1945 witnessed the beginnings of Robot Warfare. It was generally known, from the German propaganda, that “Vengeance Weapons” were being developed and since the Normandy landings we knew that “flying bombs” were launched against Great Britain. The...

@Muller: Thanks for the comments! Three more instalments should finish the story.

Start, part 11 The Famine Winter And now we come to what for many people has been the most traumatic episode of the war, the winter of 1944-1945, which went down into history as the Famine Winter. Of course there were marked regional differences, the South of the country (see map earlier)...

General note to readers: Since a week or so, t-rocket and I are “in cahoots” over the V2 rocket and I strongly recommend his excellent website. He just sent me an aerial photograph taken on Febr. 6th, 1945, showing a series of V2s in the Haagsche Bosch, out in the open. They are lined up on...

@t-rocket: Most interesting and this requires a careful answer! 1) Obviously, the planners of the raid were aware of the risk of causing civilian casualties. The standard operating procedure in such cases should (and probably: must, or will) have been that the mission shall be aborted if the...

Start, part 10 Evacuation again A month after the Oosterbeek debacle, on October 21st, the authorities declared the entire area a war zone and announced that everybody had to leave the next day. We packed a suitcase and two bags each, leaving everything else behind and joined an endless...

@Marcel: yes, but there are good references in the Wikipedia article for further exploration. @ All: continued this weekend! P.S. Australian troops were also very active in North Africa, of course.

@Marcel: there's a good article on Wikipedia: Noorderlicht(krant).

@Watanbe: Thanks for your kind comments! Ah, yes, the Boomerang, both it and the Wirraway were derivatives of the Harvard, were they not? Those Australian aircraft were never seen over here, of course. On the whole, the role of the Australians is almost unknown to the Dutch, unless they are...

@ Marcel: dankuwel! I had discovered the "manage attachments" button, but that's how I uploaded my pic to the album. Linking the pic to the post is still unclear, but "I have my personnel to do that for me".... @ B17 engineer: I told the Colorado beetle story to visiting American friends, over...