{"id":31298,"date":"2015-05-10T05:00:43","date_gmt":"2015-05-10T09:00:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=31298"},"modified":"2018-01-15T18:44:55","modified_gmt":"2018-01-15T23:44:55","slug":"in-the-netherlands-1945-nobody-swaggered","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2015\/05\/10\/in-the-netherlands-1945-nobody-swaggered\/","title":{"rendered":"In the Netherlands, 1945, nobody “swaggered”"},"content":{"rendered":"

David Warren<\/a> on the task of the First Canadian Army after liberating The Netherlands:<\/p>\n

It wasn\u2019t only the liberation, but what our boys did after, in that devastated country. The Netherlands \u2014 but Canadians call her \u201cHolland\u201d \u2014 had suffered proportionally more than any other country the Wehrmacht had crushed and occupied, and would continue to suffer \u2014 famine \u2014 after their final defeat. The bastards blew the dikes to slow our allied advance. Breached, the lands flooded; \u2026 deaths heaped on deaths.<\/p>\n

Victory is sweet, but there was no swagger, from the Dutch still mired in Hell.<\/p>\n

And memorably, neither from our boys, who had liberated them. They didn\u2019t swagger. Instead, they set down their guns and their helmets and went to work \u2014 spontaneously, voluntarily, on the enormous task of repair; of fixing the dikes and clearing the farms of salt-mud and debris. Of breaking the stones, and smoothing the roads, and shifting the rubble. The food bags, too, were starting to arrive, from Canada and the States \u2014 the tins and boxes; the cigarettes and medical supplies; and the candy, for the little children.<\/p>\n

This wasn\u2019t the Marshall Plan. It was three years before that. The Royal Canadian Air Force was dropping food from the sky, as fast as it could. (Our pilots read, \u201cThank you Canadians!\u201d on rooftops.) Crates and drums were being discharged through the busted ports, wheat and flour from our Prairies. Yet thousands were still perishing from hunger.<\/p>\n

And more: all the stuff sent by unorganized people, to wherever they thought it would do some good; to Germany as well as Holland; to wherever people must be desperate and starving. And back home our boys\u2019 own families were throwing themselves into action, packing and shipping; and slipping in the letters of love and encouragement to strangers and new friends over the sea.<\/p>\n

We were already hand-in-glove with the Dutch, from sheltering their royal family in exile. The magnificent Queen Wilhelmina, scourge of politicians (Churchill called her \u201cthe only real man\u201d among all the exiled governors in London), no longer speaking in the nights, through the radio. For she had returned, to a rapturous welcome. And now, too, their little princess \u2014 Margriet Francisca \u2014 born in Ottawa Civic Hospital, in a maternity ward that had been declared Dutch sovereign territory for the occasion.<\/p>\n

Every year, the tulips still come from Holland to decorate our Parliament Hill. And Dutch kids are still taught in school how to sing, \u201cO Canada.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

David Warren on the task of the First Canadian Army after liberating The Netherlands: It wasn\u2019t only the liberation, but what our boys did after, in that devastated country. The Netherlands \u2014 but Canadians call her \u201cHolland\u201d \u2014 had suffered proportionally more than any other country the Wehrmacht had crushed and occupied, and would continue […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35193,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,62,1118,7,5,230],"tags":[954,222],"class_list":["post-31298","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cancon","category-europe","category-germany","category-history","category-military","category-ww2","tag-firstcanadianarmy","tag-netherlands"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/favicon.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-88O","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31298","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=31298"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31298\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":31299,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31298\/revisions\/31299"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=31298"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=31298"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=31298"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}