Personal recollections of WW2

[fass]

@ Renrich:
The Dutch population then amounted to about 9M or so. But when you say that a Texan city slicker would have no problem in conversing with a Texan countryman, would they be of the same social status? Or lawyer vs cattle herder? Of course university-educated people in the Netherlands then spoke more or less the same sort of language, but that did (and does!) not apply to the general population. You'll see from my further recollections that I encountered this difference myself during the war, and here's some more:
In the Fifties, I was in the Army and found myself in command of 40 rather piratical conscript soldiers. About half were Frisians and although they could speak Dutch, they only spoke Frisian among themselves. To preserve my life, authority and sanity, I had to take a crash course in Frisian so that I could understand what they were saying behind my back. To show who was boss, after a week or so I suddenly shouted a command for drill in Frisian. The problem was that the other half of the troop then crashed into the Frisians because they had no idea that I was ordering a turn-about… What's more, there were two guys from a sort of Appalachian hillbilly area and I never managed to figure out more than 1 in 3 words they said…
It's not just a matter of accent. In 1968 we moved from Amsterdam to a village some 30 miles North, in an area called West-Friesland. Rarely have I heard such interesting language. Besides the accent, the inflexion is sing-song-like and there are major differences in grammar. To construct theoretical equivalents in English: one might not say: "he was caught red-handed", but "he was catched …". On the other hand, "we have worked hard" might become "we have warken hard" or something similar. And then, there were lots of words you could not place at all, a word that in Dutch means "foliage" means "tired" in West-Frisian. Plus weird expressions like "he has his alarm clock well-set" for "he's bright" or "were you on the bum (word for your buttocks) yesterday" meaning "were you on the road". To make matters even more complicated, we had a carpenter from a village 2 miles away and when you treated him to a few beers he became difficult to follow even for his employees from our own village… That Babylonic confusion is still flourishing!
Regard the Netherlands as a patchwork quilt. Many of those differences go back 500 years, I think it would be quite surprising if you found a 98% Catholic village right in the middle of Texas, would it not?

An example: two of the most famous Dutch tourist traps are the village of Volendam and the village on the island of Marken. The autochthonic population (let's forget "aliens" that immigrated from other planets like nearby Amsterdam...) consisted of two groups: farmers and fishermen. The farmers are Protestant, the fishermen Roman Catholic. There may be a few exceptions and some may have lapsed, but that's the general picture. Marken is in sight of the fishermen's area of Volendam, 2 miles away, but is Protestant throughout. Edam, another tourist attraction, is about a mile distant from Volendam, but is Protestant and the Edam burghers tried to convert the Roman Catholic Volendam tars for a century or two...

That is why some Dutch will object to people saying they live in Holland, which is only the area of the two westernmost provinces of the Netherlands. If you say a Frisian or a guy from Limburg (in the South) comes from Holland, he'll show the same reaction as when you tell a Scotsman he's English…

As Gnomey would certainly confirm... Thanks for the Dowding statue quote, Gnomey, if anobody was treated shabbily it's him but if he had not been so obstinate we might now all speak German...

Another serving coming up in the weekend!

 

[renrich]

This is a most interesting dialogue which certainly opens my eyes somewhat about the differences between Europe and the US. I believe there is portion of the US, the Northeast which is a little more class conscious than the rest of the country but Texas in the 40s was and still is a very egalitarian society, with the exception of the African American, as they are called today. There was segregation in the years of the war and until the 60s practised in the South and North but in the South there were no language problems because the Southern versions of English had many characteristics in common with the language and slang of the Black members of our society. A cowboy or perhaps roughneck(worker in the oil fields) would have no problem communicating with the ranch owner or a CEO of an oil company headquartered in New York and there was mutual respect rendered by both in the knowledge that they both had jobs that were essential for the other to operate. I was a squad leader in the Army in the 50s and had a mixed group in the squad with me being the only Texan. I had a college degree from a university in Texas so spoke a dialect called Texan and had no trouble conversing with hill billies, Blacks or guys from the Bronx. In a speech once Sam Houston made the statement that "a Texan was just as good as any other man." From the audience came a shout, "yes, and a damn sight better too." That is( or was) pretty much the attitude of where I come from.

 

[fass]

Renrich, it's not a question of class or class consciousness! Not of segregation either, which we never had. And certainly there is no difference as regards mutual respect in the USA and the Netherlands, for instance. Any Dutchman will agree that a Frisian is as good as any other man and the Frisian girls are better than all of them, some will shout. I've spent a lot of time in the USA and in those respects (and most others) we don't differ at all. From my own experience there, I did note rather marked variations in English between Bostonians and people from Arkansas, say. And they noted differences in my English and their own - like glasses and spectacles, lift and elevator, flatlets and apartments, hi and good morning... But there's a perfect parallel in your country: how's your Navajo? or your Cajun?

 

[Marcel]

Renrich, In the Netherlands there are a few "languages". You have the general Dutch language, which is the official language which everybody can speak in some sorts, and you have the several dialects, regional "languages". Frisian is considered a proper language with it's own grammar etc. Furthermore you have a large group of "Saxian" languages, like: Gronings in the north, Zeeuws in the southwest, "Achterhoeks" in the east, different languages with lots in common and also very similar to Platt Deutch, a German language.
For the rest you have several dialects which are variations of the general Dutch, like Brabants (which is actually is not unlike Flemmish), West-Fries as fass described etc. Last but not least, Limburgs, which is a story of it's own.

The reason that the "higher educated" speak "better" (notice the quotes) Dutch is that they meet people from all over the country at the University, even usually leave their place of birth and need to learn speaking Dutch with as less accent as possible as the wouldn't be understood by their fellow students. For instance, when I left Groningen for Wageningen to complete my study, my Dutch almost sounded like Gronings. Believe me, a "Hollander" would not understand me. I learned to loose my accent quickly there. Now living in Holland (Dordrecht) I hardly hear anyone recognising me as a Groninger. However whenever I meet my friends who never left Groningen, it doesn't take much time to adjust to my former accent again .

Nowadays, these regional differences are dying out, as more and more people start to lean "proper dutch" instead of their dialect. I figure it won't take another 50 years before it'll be vanished, which is a pitty. It gave the Dutch language a colourful diversity I think. I myself am still proud being a Groninger next to being a Dutchman, although living in the west. I still like to speak Gronings whenever possible.

 

[renrich]

I worked in Cajun Country in the oil patch and can converse pretty well. I live close to a Navajo Res and have no idea what they are talking about and I cannot speak much Spanish either. However, English is our native language and I have no trouble understanding it anywhere in our country except that I am hard of hearing.. Going back to war memories, here in the US and I think our population was around 150M, the war had an impact on everyone's life. My father was one of seven brothers and four served. My father was in an essential industry, railroads, and if he was lucky he got a day off every now and then. My mother had three brothers and two served. They all survived. There were no mothers in Texas, as I recall, who had more than four sons serving. My grandmother had a bunch of stars in her window. I vaguely remember Pearl Harbor. I remember well D-Day as the air raid sirens were set off in Dallas that night of the landings and I sat in front of the radio next day listening to the reports. There was gas rationing, tires were unavailable, no new bicycles, meat, sugar, coffee rationing. Tin was in short supply. Butter disappeared and we ate margarine that was white and came with food coloring. My parents were lucky as they had an almost new car, a 1940 Dodge, when war broke out. As an example of driving habits in those days, especially during the war, they traded that car in 1950 and it had 30000 miles on it. I put that much mileage on a car sometimes in one year. Texas is big and one could not go far on the gas available during the war however it was not rationed until well after the war began. The war was quite evident in Texas because of the many military bases and the defense industry. In addition the oil industry was running at full blast as well as agriculture. Texas supplied the majority of the oil the US supplied during the war which I believe was about six sevenths of what the Allies used. Obviously the economy boomed in the US and especially Texas. That war began the transformation of Texas from a rural to urban society. When I was in San Antonio, where there is a huge military presence, during the war, I saw Italian and German POWs, guarded by MPs, tending the landscaping at Fort Sam Houston. From what I have read, the Axis POWs in the USA had a good life compared to being imprisoned in Germany and even Britain. The Brits could hardly feed themselves, much less enemy POWs. There was no shortage of certain foods in the US. It goes without saying that few Japanese were captured and imprisoned in the US. My two sea dog uncles(Dad's brothers) who were on cruisers when the war began for us came home on leave and stayed with us in Dallas in, I believe, 1943. They were obviously stressed out and could not get on the outside of enough beer. Pretty close mouthed about the war and never really talked about it until well after the war. Obviously none of these memories of the war hold a candle to those in an occupied country. I recently met a Brit about my age who lived in Manchester, England, as a child and he told about watching German bombers following a river near Manchester to their target. His memories are quite similar to those of John Keegan's, a famous British military historian who is our age.

 

[renrich]

It may come as surprise to you that we do have communities in Texas that are predominately one religion or another. The small towns with a dominant Mexican population have the Catholic Religion and San Antonio, with it's Spanish and Mexican heritage is loaded with Catholic institutions. In Central Texas we have communities that are predominately German in origin with the Lutheran Church prevelant. We have towns that are heavily Czech. It is interesting that in the German, Czech and even French communities, many of the people use the European language frequently but are also fluent in English and that includes the recent influx of Orientals. The only ones who don't seem to assimilate well are the Latinos which are more likely to be called Hispanics, which is a misnomer, IMO. Many of them, as well as their children have a hard time with English. Partly the result of so called bilingual education. Another point is that during WW2, there were no voting instructions in the polls in anything but English and no telephone operators asking if you wanted Spanish or English.

 

[fass]

Start, part 3
"Flying machines" are among my very first memories. From 1934 until 1937 we were living near Ypenburg airfield (in the vicinity of The Hague) where the "Luchtvaartafdeling" (military aviation department) was flying machines like the Fokker CV biplane and regularly flew over.
But by far my most vivid early memory was the airship Hindenburg flying over our house in 1936 (I was 2 then). That was not the flight that ended in disaster, by the way. A silver cigar of almost 250 metres long that stays in the air despite almost standing still looks impossible and it's no wonder that I can recall that image after more than 70 years...
By early 1940, I could read fairly well and had become an aircraft enthusiast. One of my first serious books was about aircraft, teaching me the difference between air-cooled and liquid-cooled engines, for instance.

War approaches
My first recollection of hearing the word "war" goes back to 1937, when the adults discussed the progress of the Spanish civil war. In early 1938 Hitler had annexed Austria and when tension developed because of the Sudetenland question, neighbours decided to emigrate to Australia, mentioning the threat of war as the reason. The infamous Munich Agreement convinced many people of "peace in our time", but when the remainder of Czechoslovakia was annexed in March 1939 the illusion ended – although the general view was that our strict neutrality would of course be respected… Despite increasing tension between Germany and Poland, in June 1939 we spent a week staying with an aunt in Belgium, where I became aware that there had been an earlier war, in 1914-1918 (the Netherlands had indeed remained neutral then). But in August, the Dutch armed forces were mobilized and hoarding started – two new words added to my vocabulary. Hoarding meant that people started to save small stocks of articles they thought would become scarce if war ensued. The problem was certainly not seen as one of life-threatening famine, because we would, of course, not be at war ourselves (we were strictly neutral, remember?), but it might become difficult to get things like coffee, tea, sugar or tobacco from our colonies… People were incredibly naïve then, as we would conclude now.
A month later Poland was overrun and WW2 had begun. During the next few months, I became familiar with the word "submarine" and I can remember that there was great sympathy for Finland when it was attacked by Soviet Russia. Otherwise, it seems that news was scarce in that period of Phoney War, because I have no memories of hearing news bulletins about the Graf Spee, for instance. Of course it must have been mentioned, but apparently it was not a frequently discussed subject. The last warning came when Denmark and Norway were attacked and occupied in April 1940 – that showed what protection neutrality gave.
End, part 3

 

[renrich]

Another memory from WW2 was there were "paper drives" where discarded newspapers and other forms of paper were gathered up by organisations. I was a Boy Scout and worked in numerous paper drives. At one time we had so much paper gathered in bales it filled about one half of a one car garage. We would stack the bales up to make walls for forts and make rubber guns, with which to have huge battles. There were two types, automatics and single shots. An automatic was a piece of wood shaped like a rifle which had perhaps three notches where the receiver would have been. A rubber "bullet" was stretched from the muzzle back to the first notch with a lanyard in place in the notch. The middle notch was "loaded" the same way as well as the back notch. All three "bullets" could be fired at once with one yank of the lanyard or they could be sqeezed off one at a time. A single shot was usually shaped like a pistol with a clothes pin on the back of the grip which held the end of the bullet and was the trigger. The problem was that wood and clothes pins were plentiful but rubber was not. Synthetic rubber made poor "bullets" and a genuine rubber inner tube which had been discarded after being patched many times was much prized. Where the tube was not patched we cut the tube across which resulted in a rubber ring about one half to three quarters of an inch wide. A knot was tied in the middle, making it look like a figure eight and giving it a good ballistic coefficient and sectional density. Different "calibers" depended on the size of the tube. Truck tubes for large caliber "rounds" and auto tires for pistol rounds. We did not have many toys in those days because of the economy in the 30s and because of the war but we made do.

 

[fass]

Start, part 4

"Maydays"
The attack in the West, on May 10th, 1940, began with bombing and paratroop landings. By then we were living in the Hague, about a mile from one of the royal palaces that was the target of a paratroop detachment – an operation that failed. We stayed indoors so I did not see anything, but the explosions of bombs and anti-aircraft artillery came from all directions and some were nearby and the sound of the air-raid sirens alarmed us time and again. However, "we ran out of milk" and because that was an intolerable situation, of course, we did some shopping when things seemed quiet. Even in the midst of war, people try to continue their normal life and shops were open for "business as usual". Earlier, a Ju52/3M had been hit by triple A and gone down burning. There's a famous picture of it, taken by an amateur photographer and reproduced in almost any book on the subject of "May 1940" – I doubt whether the guy received any royalties... It had crashed on a block of houses and as we passed that street I spent ample time examining one of the engines, which was lying in the middle of the road. I was quite interested to see that it was made by BMW, I knew they made cars, but their range in aero-engines was new to me!
News about the war was minimal but it was evident that we were not winning… The smoke from the bombing of Rotterdam on May 14th, 30 miles away, could be seen from the roof of our house. This air-raid is still a bone of contention. After the war, a Tribunal ruled that it had not been a war crime, but that is still being hotly debated. I'm not quite sure why this should have become such a conflagration, the total weight of the bombs was less than 100 tons – later in the war that was a representative load for only 25 Lancasters or 50 B-17s! One explanation given is that warehouses in the port area were hit and these contained large supplies of inghly inflammable stuff like fat and cocoa. The Rotterdam bombing also led to a classic case of "desinformatsija" when later on a member of the Dutch government, which had fled to Great Britain, gave a figure of 30,000 deaths. This was still quoted in many publications several years after the war, but the actual figure was between 800 and 900. When other cities were also threatened with bombing, the country capitulated on May 15th.

On fear
Fear is incapacitating, especially when it leads to its corollaries: terror and panic. Also, fear may be long-lasting or even permanent, one can "live in fear". From 1940 to 1945, there were occasions when I was alarmed, or frightened, and I have even been scared stiff sometimes, but there were only two instances connected with fear. Up to a certain individually different level, fear can be controlled by training – that's what makes the difference between an orderly retreat and a rout. I did receive such "on hands" training – from my mother. It may have been different for her inside, but from the outside she stayed perfectly in control – in fact, the worse things looked, the better she performed.
One of the things people dreaded the most before the war was gas, based on reports from the Great War. Whilst the British government supplied gas masks to the population on a large scale (Mickey Mouse gas masks for the kids), the Dutch government had not taken this precaution. But a "gas attack" was a familiar expression to me and I already had personal experience with the effects of "gas". A relative attempted suicide while staying with us, using the gas oven while we were shopping. When we came home, my mother realised what had happened and ran to the kitchen. She gave me a competent sequence of commands: "breathe in, run and open the door to the garden, only then breathe out, run to the neighbours telling them to call an ambulance". She herself dragged the patient outside and started resuscitation. The relative survived to a ripe old age.
On May 13th, 1940 we again ran out of food and not much appeared to happen nearby so we went out. As we came back, we passed a military barracks and suddenly a soldier ran out, weeping hysterically and screaming "GAS! GAS!". The sight of an adult, and a soldier into the bargain, totally losing control of himself was shocking and that's when I first tasted fear. We ran home, started breathing through teacloths soaked in vinegar (not really effective, you're right…) but after a while we looked at each other and my mother said "you know, I think that soldier simply lost his head". A typical comment my mother would make when there was an air attack was "they're not aiming at us"- which, of course, was perfectly true!

End, part 4

 

[rochie]

amazing post fass, please continue whenever you have the time

 

[Marcel]

A few notes on the bombing of Rotterdam:
Although casualties might not have been as high as 30.000, the city centre was quite thoroughly destroyed. One reason why the damage in Rotterdam was severe is that, although being a major port city and quite modern, the fire-brigade was hugely undermanned and totally old-fashion. There is a story of a German paratrooper who said that they were looking in horror that the Dutch were trying to put out the huge flames with buckets of water instead of proper hoses. The Dutch replied they had none. This really stunned the Germans.
The reason why some still consider the bombing of Rotterdam a war crime is that it took place after negotiations started to surrender the city. German sources claim that radio contact was lost so the bombers were unaware that they had been recalled. German troops on the ground had fired warning signals to stop the attack, but they were either not seen or ignored. Fact is that not all the bombers really did bomb, supporting this claim. Still remains the question whether the bombing crews had any secret orders. Knowing Goering and Hitler, they were quite willing of doing such and so this is a probable possibility. Still, the German claim is the only real explanation.

 

[fass]

Thanks for the comment, Rochie, more coming up soon.
I'm glad Marcel jumps in with his remarks on the bombing of Rotterdam. Shows that I'm not exaggerating when I said that it is still a bone of contention. I won't start a discussion on the legal aspects, because that's outside the scope of my thread and would require a separate thread for in-depth treatment, but will add just two comments:
1) an ominous fact was the explicit threat that other cities like Utrecht "would suffer the same fate if capitulation was not accepted". That indicated the intention to carry out true "terror bombing", which, of course, would be unacceptable according to international law. I'll discuss strategic bombing in a separate paragraph later.
2) I know the German story about the totally archaic fire-fighting facilities in Rotterdam. However, we in The Hague (30 miles away) had a fire-brigade garage close by. This had at least 3 gleaming ultra-modern Magirus fire-engines which I always admired as I passed by - and of course there were many fire-brigade stations in the city. They all went to Rotterdam on the same day as the bombing took place, I saw that the station was empty.
In other words: here we have one of those instances where careful research is necessary to separate the chaff from the corn. There are many such in history...

 

[fass]

Intermezzo
Renrich mentioned the fact that some veterans still hesitate to talk about their experiences. I have a good example of that.
In the Eighties, I had arrived in Atlanta, GA, for business and took a taxi at the airport. As it was going to be a long ride, I sat up front with the driver and we started to talk. I told him I was Dutch and somehow the conversation turned into me mentioning the Ploesti raid, a most traumatic experience for the participants. This is what followed:
Driver: "I was in that raid"
fass: "do you mean the low level raid, for Pete's sake?"
D.: "yep, that was the one".
fass: "Holy cow, thank you for what you did. What Group were you in, the Liberandos, Sky Scorpions, Eight Balls, or what?"

It turned out to be the Sky Scorpions. He then became quite emotional. What he told me was that the few times he mentioned Ploesti to his fellow-men, people said something like "never heard of it" so he shut up. And here was a foreigner who thanked him and knew the name of his outfit. So for the first time since the war, he could talk about it…

 

[fass]

Start, part 5

The fact that the government, and especially the royal family, fled to Great Britain caused almost as much indignation as the attack by the Germans did. There were numerous cases (also in my own family) of people tearing up the queen's portrait or trampling on it… Also, there was a general feeling that we had been left in the lurch by "the Allies" – despite the fact that being strictly neutral meant that we had not been allied with anyone… In the week after the country capitulated, I saw several Ju52/3m machines that had crashed in the meadows around the city. Losses among the transport planes had been heavy. We also visited an aunt in hospital, where there were many soldiers wounded in the fighting around the Hague. I spoke to a Dutch soldier and he told me that the patient in the next bed was a German but "a nice guy". I was surprised he said that, but he told me "we're no longer enemies now".
Although the country was now occupied by the enemy, at first life largely went on as normal. There had not been a mass panic and hordes of refugees as was the case in France, so that the structure of society had not been disrupted. The German troops behaved impeccably, contact between the military and the population was on the whole not unfriendly. The German authorities were rather "reasonable" and people tried to make the best of it – "accommodation" (not: collaboration) was the rule.

So in August we happily went on vacation to a village in Limburg, in the South. That was situated on a major railway line from Belgium and France to the Ruhr and once or twice each day, endless trains (over a hundred) of flatbed cars with two or even three giant steam locomotives passed by, loaded with wrecked cars, trucks and aircraft wrecks with French and British roundels and German crosses, destined for recycling. That may have included some of the wreckage of May-June, including the wrecked British equipment left at Dunkirk, but the Battle of Britain was in full swing then also.

Some major changes were immediately noticed, however. Tropical products like tea, coffee, tobacco and peanuts quickly vanished, to move to the "black market". Fairly soon, new banknotes and postage stamps were introduced – the old ones had shown the portrait of the queen. New coins appeared too, of zinc (non-strategic material) instead of copper and silver. Especially in the availability of information, the changes were noticeable. Not every family had a subscription to a daily paper before the war, but now all papers were subject to censorship. Not every family had a radio, but now all programmes were censored. The weather forecast had immediately disappeared from the papers and the news bulletins with the onset of war because it was information the enemy could use. Listening to foreign stations - especially the BBC – was strictly forbidden. Later on, radio sets themselves were forbidden. Nevertheless it was surprising how much reliable information remained available throughout the war – besides totally unfounded rumours, of course. Some people clandestinely listened to the BBC, but unfortunately that great institution was not always reliable either… An intelligent reader could often sieve the truth from the German propaganda; for instance, when the Normandy landings took place in June 1944, one of the censored papers ran the headline: "Long expected invasion has taken place". The "long expected" still sounds almost wishful…

One example of a reliable information source concerned aircraft recognition, at which I soon became proficient. It still surprises me that the official German aircraft recognition pocketbook was available to the general public. Even a kid could buy it in several bookshops and like some of my friends, I immediately did so when a new edition appeared. There were drawings and photographs of German, Italian, British, Russian (from 1941) and (from 1942) American aircraft. Also, there were data on speed, ceiling etc. but not for the Axis aircraft. I am unable to explain the origin of the pictures of Allied aircraft in those booklets, after the war there was a lively trade in aircraft photographs (6x9 cm glossy prints) for hobbyists and all the pictures shown in the German recognition booklet were there! I can now immediately pick them out in the series of books by William Green that appeared in the Sixties, for instance. Were they obtained by German attachés via neutral countries like Portugal, Sweden or Switzerland? This remains an intrigueing puzzle… But anyway, one of my friends and I started games of aircraft recognition, flashing a picture for a second or two and asking what it was. I have no idea what those German aircraft recognition booklets are worth now, cannot find prices on the web. They must have been printed by the tens of thousands so they were not rare originally. On the other hand, the quality of the paper and binding was poor, so the survival rate may be low...

End, part 5

 

[Marcel]

2) I know the German story about the totally archaic fire-fighting facilities in Rotterdam. However, we in The Hague (30 miles away) had a fire-brigade garage close by. This had at least 3 gleaming ultra-modern Magirus fire-engines which I always admired as I passed by - and of course there were many fire-brigade stations in the city. They all went to Rotterdam on the same day as the bombing took place, I saw that the station was empty.
In other words: here we have one of those instances where careful research is necessary to separate the chaff from the corn. There are many such in history...

It's difficult to research without people like you clearing things up . Thanks fass!

There were drawings and photographs of German, Italian, British, Russian (from 1941) and (from 1942) American aircraft. Also, there were data on speed, ceiling etc. but not for the Axis aircraft. I am unable to explain the origin of the pictures of Allied aircraft in those booklets ....... Were they obtained by German attachés via neutral countries like Portugal, Sweden or Switzerland? This remains an intrigueing puzzle…

I also have a small book about aviation technique etc. I traced it back to be printed in 1942. It's written in Dutch and printed in The Netherlands. Surprisingly it gives an accurate description of several Allied aircraft, their layout and used techniques. Amongst them are the Spitfire, Whirlwind, P38, Short Stirling (!) and B17.

 

[fass]

@Marcel:
Mind you, I'm not claiming that I have the definitive answer to the fire-fighting puzzle! The fire brigade near my street may have had a birthday party then... But I believe there is even an amateur photograph of a large modern fire-engine in a burning street of Rotterdam. Perhaps it's in the book written by that good researcher Mr. Brongers, or Bongers, who also wrote about the Grebbeberg. The best solution, of course, would be to trace a guy who was a fire-fighter in Rotterdam then.
Hey, can you post a small picture of that aircraft book you have? I also had a small book like that then and from your description it may have been the same.

 

[Marcel]

Ah, that picture of the fire-truck might be this one?

Source

Hey, can you post a small picture of that aircraft book you have? I also had a small book like that then and from your description it may have been the same.

Of course, here it is:

 

[fass]

@Marcel:
1) no, that's not the fire-brigade truck photograph I mean, the picture as I remember it shows a real fire-engine with hoses standing in a burning street. I'll see whether I can find the Brongers book and whether it's in that.
2) YES!! I had not seen that booklet for 65 years (I lost everything in 1945) but I remembered it exactly as your picture shows!! In my recollection it also discusses the Bell P-39, is that correct? That would be a good test for the quality of my senile brain...

 

[Marcel]

@Marcel:
1) no, that's not the fire-brigade truck photograph I mean, the picture as I remember it shows a real fire-engine with hoses standing in a burning street. I'll see whether I can find the Brongers book and whether it's in that.
2) YES!! I had not seen that booklet for 65 years (I lost everything in 1945) but I remembered it exactly as your picture shows!! In my recollection it also discusses the Bell P-39, is that correct? That would be a good test for the quality of my senile brain...

there's nothing wrong with your "senile brain"
The book is not very rare, you can still find it if you want. A quick search on "marktplaats (Dutch advertise site) gave this:
http://www.marktplaats.nl/

 

[Condora]

I' ve enjoyed reading your recollections from WWII, fass.
Keep at it!

As an aside of what has been said here, about language problems - in Portugal everybody speaks the same language, no problem understanding each other, right? VERY wrong! If someone from Lisbon is talking with a someone else from Porto, they may have an ocasional problem, when an unknown word cames up. When you consider the islands, it's even worse. There was a TV series in the early 80s which took place in the Azores, and everybody watched it, because they COULD NOT UNDERSTAND A SINGLE WORD! And the actors were speaking portuguese with azorian accent... And that's on a single-idiom country.
Accross the border, spanish people have trouble understanding local idioms, sometimes I undestood them better then they did (they are not used to listening to different languages, but that's another story).

The catholic-protestant separation is interesting, I knew that kind of social organisation existed somewhere else until the XIXth century, but was not aware it had lasted so long into the XXth century. Once again, I had a different background, as in my country we were supposed to be all cat'licks.

A lot of what happened during WWII was new: people were expecting Belgium and France to be the main battlefields of the war, that neutrality would be respected...

As soon as it was apparent it would not be so, even Portugal did some mobilization - it only occured me that it was horse-cavalry, my in-law was in the army then and he had a horse! -, but what did they expect to do with what we had at the time, beats me...

Finally, I'd love to see one of those aircraft-recognition booklets!