Chapter 11

(MAY 1940 – HOLLAND SURRENDERS)

“Hitler, who founded the Third Reich, who ruled it ruthlessly and often with uncommon shrewdness, who led it to such dizzy heights and such a sorry end, was a person of undoubted, if evil genius. It is true that in the German people, as a mysterious Providence and centuries of experience had molded them up to that time, he found a natural instrument which he was able to shape to his own sinister ends. But without Adolf Hitler, who was possessed of a demonic personality, a granite will, uncanny instincts, a cold ruthlessness, a remarkable intellect, a soaring imagination and – until the end, when, drunk with power and success, he overreached himself – an amazing capacity to size up people and situations, there almost certainly would never have been a Third Reich.”

William Shirer (historian)

That spring of 1940 was a time of mass confusion.

It was a time of panic and chaos and it was a time for dark shroud of death to fall over an entire continent. Of course, things on the other side of the word were developing at their own pace leading me to only half of the debacle that was World War II. The War in the Pacific has been excluded from this story because of the complication of competing armies, competing high ranking figures and styles of warfare that were similar in the death and dying but vastly dissimilar in the strategy and the ferocity of combat. To a large extent, the War in the Pacific was “Naval Warfare” with amphibious landings being the linchpin to the island hopping strategy.

It might have seemed to some that I was being a bit cowardly in taking a leisurely cruise to Marseilles to investigate the atmosphere of “Vichy” existence but in all honesty, I have to confess that I had a premonition that it would be best for me to avoid the whole “Dunkirk – Fall of France and “Blitzkrieg” thing with the flavor of a Gettysburg or Yorktown at its worse. I had learned over the years that stray bullets had no ulterior motives and that on a battlefield; luck was the final decider of survival.

The swift invasion of the German shock troops into Western Europe bought an end to the so-called “Phony War” and revealed the extent of the weakness of the war-ravaged nations with ruling governments that were stridently anti-military.

Britain was the only European country with a decidedly anti-Hitler attitude and even that country was fairly evenly divided about waging war or continuing to appease the land-hungry dictator.

At several ports of call, I gained updates on the war on the western front and the news was just as I had expected and I knew my strategic withdrawal was the best solution to the hectic circumstances.

Barcelona was in a festive mood even whilst the British Army regulars were taking heavy fire from the encircling Wehrmacht with seemingly endless stores of ammunition and explosives. The news that the British Air forces were needed to defend the island fortress and unable to come to their rescue was a bitter pill to swallow but that was quickly followed by the morale-busting alert that the British Navy was not coming into the “Lion’s Den” of German submarines to scoop up the Army survivors and bring them to bases in England or Scotland to rally and train for new military encounters.

The French were in complete disorder with the fall of the government and the disarming of all military personnel.

Marshall Petain, a hero of World War I came to the forefront and was tapped to assume control of the eastern portion of France and establish the “Vichy” government assigned to rule the French people mostly without the presence of Nazi storm troopers. In effect, the French authorities and the French police assumed the duties of the SS and they reported directly to the Gestapo authorities as directed by decree from headquarters in Berlin. The Jews and other undesirables were collected, incarcerated and transported to the Nazi concentration camps by the French authorities with little pretense that they were no less than enthusiastic bedfellows and loyal co-conspirators.

In those uncertain “early days”, the “resistance” was merely a word and very little was done to put any roadblocks in the German takeover of the entire country.

I watched the Spanish dancers pounding the wooden boards of the dancehall with their Flamenco routines shouting with the lung-power of excited arousal. It was inconceivable to me that they could be so oblivious to the chaos around them but that was the inheritance of a bloody Civil War just concluded and the embracing of their new “Neutral” status that seemed to be welcomed in all quarters.

The Jews that were lucky enough to make it to a neutral country seemed completely unable to grasp the trap and were constantly making plans to go here and there and deciding that this was probably all a big mistake and things would get back to normal in short order.

I read the story about the surrender of Holland also known as the Netherlands and I imagined it should have been the place for me to gather some insight into the character of a people that were envied by Hitler for their fortitude and stanch Aryan roots. With World War I weaponry, they fought back against overwhelming odds and knew instinctively that assistance was not coming in time from any other anti-Nazi country. In any event, they managed to slow the Wehrmacht down a little bit and the storm troopers retaliated by turning their guns against the unarmed civilian populace. The surrender was forced by the fear that the innocent civilians would become the victims if the armed military continued to resist any longer.

Just as in Belgium, Luxembourg and France, there was already a budding fifth column of Nazi sympathizers infiltrated into most of the larger cities that had been in existence since the very beginning of the Nazi party inside Germany proper. I knew that eventually a SS component of the German Army would be Dutch and filled with volunteers from the tiny country fighting mostly on the Eastern Front. The quick surrenders of Holland, Belgium and Luxembourg created such a gap in the defensive line that the French were rolled up and left to rot in their isolated Maginot Line to be mopped up later with little spirit of resistance. In fact, there was little to suggest that other than a few officers with professional attitudes, the French military had any inclination to oppose the German invasion of their supposed beloved country.