- 2 days ago
Four hundred calories a day. That was what three million Dutch civilians were living on by February 1945. Some weren't living on it at all.
When the first Canadian trucks rolled into the eastern Netherlands that April, the soldiers handed out chocolate bars and chewing gum. The Dutch children who reached for them had never tasted either. But the soldiers quickly realized something — the people they were feeding were the lucky ones. The real catastrophe was sixty kilometers west, behind a hundred thousand German troops, and completely unreachable.
What happened over the next eleven days involved a jeep with a bedsheet, unarmed bombers flying low enough to read rooftop messages, and a decision that no military manual had ever covered.
Eighty years later, the Dutch still haven't forgotten. Every Christmas Eve, an entire town walks into a cemetery in the dark and lights thirteen hundred candles. One for each Canadian buried there.
The reason why starts with a tulip bulb.
#canadianwarstories #ww2 #canadianarmy #militaryhistory #canadianhistory #worldwar2
When the first Canadian trucks rolled into the eastern Netherlands that April, the soldiers handed out chocolate bars and chewing gum. The Dutch children who reached for them had never tasted either. But the soldiers quickly realized something — the people they were feeding were the lucky ones. The real catastrophe was sixty kilometers west, behind a hundred thousand German troops, and completely unreachable.
What happened over the next eleven days involved a jeep with a bedsheet, unarmed bombers flying low enough to read rooftop messages, and a decision that no military manual had ever covered.
Eighty years later, the Dutch still haven't forgotten. Every Christmas Eve, an entire town walks into a cemetery in the dark and lights thirteen hundred candles. One for each Canadian buried there.
The reason why starts with a tulip bulb.
#canadianwarstories #ww2 #canadianarmy #militaryhistory #canadianhistory #worldwar2
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LearningTranscript
00:00April 17th, 1945. Appledorn, the Netherlands. Sergeant Herb Pike of the 48th Highlanders of
00:07Canada walked into a town that looked, from a distance, like it had survived the war.
00:12The buildings were mostly intact. The streets were clear. There were no shell craters,
00:16no collapsed rooftops, no smoldering wreckage. But something was wrong. People were standing
00:22along the road, hundreds of them, then thousands. They were cheering. They were waving flags that
00:27had been hidden for five years. Some were crying. And Herb Pike, 23 years old, a man who had fought
00:33his way from Sicily, through Italy, and across the Rhine, could not stop staring at their faces.
00:39They were skeletal. Women who looked 60 turned out to be 30. Children stood on legs so thin
00:44Pike could see the shape of the bone through their skin. A man reached toward the convoy and collapsed
00:49before his hand touched the truck. The Dutch were cheering their liberators, and their liberators
00:54were watching them die. Pike would remember this for the rest of his life. Not the sound of the crowd.
00:59Not the flags. The faces. He said later that the civilians were in terrible shape.
01:04That their health was destroyed. That they had been eating tulip bulbs just to stay alive.
01:09But here is what Herb Pike did not yet know. What no Canadian soldier rolling into the Netherlands
01:14that spring fully understood. The people of Appledorn were not the worst cases. They were not even close.
01:20Appledorn was in the east, where farms still grew food and some supply lines still functioned.
01:25Behind the German positions, to the west, in Amsterdam, in Rotterdam, in The Hague,
01:313 million people were trapped in a famine so severe that 20,000 had already died,
01:36and hundreds more were dying every day. The Canadians had found the edge of a catastrophe.
01:41The center of it was still 60 kilometers away, behind enemy guns, and completely out of reach.
01:46This is the story of what Canadian soldiers discovered when they pushed into the Netherlands
01:51in the spring of 1945. And what they did when they realized that winning the war would not be
01:57enough to save the people they had come to free. If this story deserves to be heard, hit the like
02:01button and subscribe. It helps these stories reach the people who care about them. To understand what
02:07the Canadians walked into, you need to understand what happened seven months earlier. And it starts with
02:13an act of extraordinary courage by ordinary Dutch people. An act that was supposed to help win the
02:18war, and instead, nearly destroyed a nation. September 17, 1944. The Dutch government in exile,
02:26sitting safely in London, sent a message to the people of the occupied Netherlands.
02:30The message was simple. Go on strike. Shut down the railways.
02:35The Allies were launching Operation Market Garden, a massive airborne assault aimed at punching through the
02:41Netherlands and crossing the Rhine into Germany. If the Dutch railway workers stopped the trains,
02:46German reinforcements could not move. The strike could shorten the war by months. The response was
02:51immediate and overwhelming. Across the country, 30,000 railway workers walked off the job. Trains stopped,
02:59stations went dark. The Dutch had bet everything on the Allies breaking through. The Allies did not break
03:05through. Market Garden failed at Arnhem. The British paratroopers were crushed. The Great Bridge was never
03:11taken. And the railway workers, who had risked their lives on a promise, were left exposed, in an occupied
03:17country with no liberation coming, and a Nazi administration that had just been humiliated.
03:23Remember that date, September 27, 1944. Because on that day, the German military commander in the Netherlands,
03:31Friedrich Christensen, signed an order that would sentence millions of people to starvation.
03:36In retaliation for the railway strike, the Germans imposed an embargo on all food transport from the
03:42agricultural east to the densely populated west. No grain. No potatoes. No milk. No meat. Nothing.
03:50The Western Netherlands, home to Amsterdam, Rotterdam, The Hague, Utrecht, held nearly half the country's
03:58population in a strip of land smaller than Connecticut. These cities had almost no farmland.
04:03They depended entirely on food shipped in from the countryside. And overnight, that supply was gone.
04:09The embargo was supposed to be temporary. A punishment. A message. But the Dutch railway workers
04:15refused to go back. The strike held through October. Through November. Through the winter. And by the
04:21time the Germans partially lifted the embargo in November, it was already too late. The canal system that
04:27could have moved food by water had frozen solid in one of the coldest winters in decades.
04:32The roads were impassable. The distribution networks had collapsed. And three million people began to
04:38starve. What happened next, over the following five months, is one of the most harrowing chapters in the
04:44history of Western Europe. And when the Canadians finally reached it, when they saw with their own eyes
04:49what starvation had done to an entire civilization, it changed them. Some of them never spoke about it.
04:55Others could not stop. But before the Canadians could find what was waiting behind those German lines,
05:01something else had to happen first. Something no one in the Allied High Command was willing to do.
05:06And something two junior Canadian officers decided to do on their own. In a jeep. With a white bed sheet
05:12and a bottle of whiskey. By November 1944, the Western Netherlands had entered a period the Dutch would call
05:19the hunger winter. And the word hunger does not come close. In Amsterdam, a city of 800,000 people,
05:27the official daily ration dropped to 600 calories. Then 500. Then, by February 1945, 340. A single slice
05:37of bread and a bowl of watery soup made from sugar beets. That was a day's food for a grown
05:42man. For a
05:43mother. For a child. To put that number in perspective, a Canadian soldier's daily ration was
05:48over 3000 calories. What a man in Amsterdam received in a week, a private from Saskatchewan ate before
05:55lunch. The things people did to survive would have been unimaginable a year earlier. Families stripped
06:00wallpaper from their walls and boiled the paste for the flour and the glue. They pulled up floorboards and
06:06burned them for heat because fuel had vanished along with food. They ate dogs, cats, rats. In the streets of
06:14Rotterdam, people chased seagulls. In The Hague, women stood in lines for hours to receive a single ladle of soup
06:20made from tulip bulbs. Bulbs that had been sitting in warehouses meant for the spring planting season and were
06:27now the last source of carbohydrates in the city. Tulip bulbs taste bitter. They cause nausea. They are difficult to
06:33digest.
06:34But they kept people alive for one more day. And one more day was all anyone was counting on. The
06:40Dutch
06:40called them hunger tochten, hunger treks. Thousands of people, mostly women, walked east from the cities
06:46into the countryside, on foot or on bicycles with no tires, carrying whatever they could trade. A wedding
06:52ring for a bag of potatoes. A silver spoon for a loaf of bread. A family clock for a sack
06:58of wheat. They walked
06:5920, 30, 40 kilometers in freezing temperatures. And some of them never came back. They collapsed on the
07:06roads. They froze in ditches. And the farmers who had food to give were overwhelmed. There were too
07:12many hands reaching. Too many mouths open. And the Germans were still confiscating whatever they could
07:17find. 40 to 50,000 children were evacuated from the western cities to the countryside. Mothers put their
07:24sons and daughters on carts and sent them to strangers. Because strangers in the east had food.
07:29And mothers in Amsterdam did not. And while this was happening, while 20,000 people slowly died,
07:35the man responsible for the occupation sat down to Christmas dinner. Arthur Seis Inquart,
07:41the Reichskommissar of the Netherlands, celebrated Christmas 1944 at his official residence in
07:47Clingendale, outside the Hague. The menu included three kinds of meat and two flavors of ice cream.
07:53The streets outside his gates were full of people who had not eaten a real meal in weeks. He knew.
07:59He had imposed the embargo himself. And he ate his dinner. Here is where the story takes a turn that
08:05should make you angry. And not only at the Germans. The Allies knew. They had known since October.
08:11Dutch officials had been sending desperate messages to London. Queen Wilhelmina had written
08:16personally to King George and President Roosevelt. Begging for military action. Or, failing that,
08:22massive food relief. Prince Bernhard, commander of Dutch forces and son-in-law of the Queen,
08:28had pleaded with Eisenhower directly. But the answer, again and again, was the same.
08:33The priority was defeating Germany. Every truck, every plane, every ton of fuel was needed for the push
08:40into the Rhineland. Feeding civilians behind enemy lines was a logistical impossibility,
08:45and a strategic risk. Food sent to the occupied Netherlands might end up feeding German soldiers.
08:52Churchill said so explicitly. The Allied High Command agreed. The Dutch would have to wait.
08:57And so, they waited. Through January. Through February. Through March. And every week, the death
09:04toll climbed. By April, the bread ration had fallen to 400 grams per week. Less than a single loaf,
09:11divided across seven days, for an entire family. Bodies were stacking up in churches because the
09:17ground was too frozen to dig graves. And there was no fuel to run hearses. In Amsterdam, the death rate
09:23was six times higher than it had been before the war. The Dutch resistance sent a message through illegal
09:28channels. Amsterdam had bread for five days. After that, nothing. This was the country the First Canadian
09:35army was advancing into. Not a battlefield in the traditional sense. Not a place where victory meant
09:40capturing a hill or crossing a river. This was a place where victory meant reaching three million
09:45people before they died. And the Canadians were still fighting their way through German positions.
09:50Town by town. Canal by canal. Losing men every day. More than a thousand killed in April alone.
09:57While the clock ran down on an entire nation. The Canadians who had already crossed into the
10:02Eastern Netherlands had seen the edges of the famine. They had seen the thin faces, the hollow eyes,
10:07the children reaching for anything a soldier might hand them. But what waited in the West was
10:12something else entirely. And reaching it would require something that no army on earth had tried
10:17before. Negotiating with the enemy to save the enemy's own hostages, while the war was still being
10:23fought. The first attempt at that negotiation would not come from a general. It would come from a
10:28captain who wrote books about wolves. April 1945. The first Canadian army was the largest army ever
10:35commanded by a Canadian general. Under General Harry Crearer, it included two Canadian corps,
10:40a British corps, a Polish armored division, and at various times, American, Belgian, and Dutch units.
10:47It stretched across a 360-mile front from Dunkirk to the North Sea. And in the final weeks of the
10:53war,
10:53its primary mission was the Netherlands. But liberating the Netherlands was not like liberating France.
10:58In France, the Canadians had used every weapon they had. Massed artillery, airstrikes,
11:04armored columns. In the Netherlands, they could not. The country was flat, threaded with canals,
11:10and packed with civilians. A single misplaced barrage could kill the very people the Canadians had
11:15come to save. Worse, the Germans had flooded vast stretches of farmland as a defensive measure,
11:21and Allied intelligence knew they were prepared to blow the dikes along the North Sea coast.
11:26If the dikes went, the ocean would pour into western Holland. A quarter of the Netherlands sits below
11:31sea level. The flooding would not just kill thousands, it would drown cities. So the Canadians
11:37fought a different kind of war. Careful. Slow. Costly. And every town they entered told the same story.
11:43On April 9th, Lt. W.J. Trump and Trooper W.H.G. Ritchie of the Fort Gary Horse rolled into
11:50Ritson,
11:51a small town east of the Eisel River. They were met by Dutch civilians who came running out of their
11:56homes, waving, shouting, some of them weeping. And then Trump and Ritchie saw the children.
12:02The children were thin in a way that soldiers from Manitoba had never seen. Not thin like hungry,
12:07thin like something was consuming them from inside. Trump reached into his ration kit,
12:12pulled out a packet of chewing gum, and handed it down. The photograph of that moment,
12:16a Canadian trooper in a beret leaning from his vehicle to hand gum to a Dutch child,
12:21would become one of the most reproduced images of the liberation. But what the photograph does not show
12:26is what was happening two towns away on the same day. German paratroopers and SS units were still
12:32fighting. They were teenagers in some cases, boys from training battalions. But they fought with the
12:38desperation of men who had nothing left to lose. And Canadians were dying.
12:42On April 15th, in Appeldorn, a German artillery shell killed Private Harry Brat. The same bombardment
12:49destroyed the home of a Dutch woman named Nellie Vandenberg. She survived. Harry did not.
12:54After the war, Nellie wrote to Harry's widow, Ruth, to tell her how her husband had died and where he
13:00had
13:00fallen. The two women, one Canadian, one Dutch, had never met. They wrote to each other for decades.
13:07Think about that for a moment. A Canadian soldier dies liberating a Dutch town. A Dutch woman whose
13:13house was destroyed by the same shell that killed him writes to his wife 3,000 miles away. And they
13:19stay in touch for 40 years. That is the kind of bond this liberation created. Not between countries,
13:26between people. Two days after Harry Brat was killed, the Canadians liberated Appeldorn. 150,000 people
13:34would pour into the streets to greet them. But in April 1945, the celebration was complicated by
13:40something the soldiers had not been trained for. They were not just liberators. They were the first
13:45source of food these people had seen in months. Canadian soldiers began handing out everything they
13:50had. Chocolate bars from their composite ration packs, biscuits, canned meat, chewing gum, cigarettes.
13:58They gave away their own meals to people who weighed less than the packs on their backs. And the Dutch,
14:03who had been surviving on tulip soup and sugar beet pulp, received their first taste of chocolate in
14:09years from the hands of 20-year-old boys from Toronto and Winnipeg and Halifax. A seven-year-old girl
14:16named Liesbeth Kolf lived in Appeldorn. When the Canadians arrived, a unit of the Royal Canadian
14:22Corps of Signals set up in her neighborhood. The soldiers adopted her. They made her an honorary
14:27captain. They gave her rank insignia and unit shoulder flashes. And her mother sewed them onto a
14:33blue sweater. Liesbeth wore that sweater every day. She kept it for 74 years. Through marriage,
14:40through children, through a life that stretched from wartime Holland to peacetime Canada. Before
14:46donating it to a military museum in Kingston, Ontario in 2018. But here is what every Canadian
14:52soldier in Appeldorn understood by the end of that first week. The people they were feeding,
14:57the children they were giving chocolate to, the families whose lives they were saving one ration
15:02pack at a time. These were the lucky ones. These were the people in the east, where some food had
15:07trickled through, where farms still functioned, where the famine had been severe but not total.
15:12The west was different. The west was behind the Grebe Line, the German defensive position that ran from
15:19Wageningen through Amersfoort to the sea. Behind that line sat Amsterdam, Rotterdam, The Hague,
15:26and Utrecht. Three million people. No food, no fuel, no medicine. And the German 25th Army,
15:33a hundred thousand strong, stood between the Canadians and every one of them. Fighting through would take
15:39weeks the Dutch did not have, and bombing the German positions would risk the dikes. The Canadians needed
15:45another way in. And on April 26th, two men decided to make one. Captain Farley Mowit was 24 years old,
15:52and had been at war since he was 19. He had landed in Sicily with the Hastings and Prince Edward
15:58Regiment,
15:58fought through Ortona in the bloodiest urban battle Canadians had ever seen, and survived the Italian
16:04campaign with a reputation for two things. Being an excellent intelligence officer, and being
16:09completely unpredictable. He wrote constantly. Letters, journals, observations. He would later
16:16become one of Canada's most famous authors, known for books about wolves and whales and the Arctic.
16:21But in April 1945, he was not writing about wolves. He was trying to figure out how to feed three
16:27million
16:28people. The message had come through the Dutch resistance, vague, unverified. It's said that
16:34the German commander in Western Holland, General Johannes Blazkowicz, wanted to discuss the civilian
16:39food crisis with the Canadians. No details, no guarantees, no safe conduct pass. Just a message
16:47that the German side was willing to talk. At Canadian intelligence headquarters, the message was discussed,
16:52and mostly dismissed. It could be a trap. It could be misinformation. It could be nothing. But two men
16:58decided it was worth the risk. Major Ken Cottom, British-born, fluent in German, with a talent for bluffing,
17:05and Captain Farley Mowit, who later admitted he thought the whole thing was insane, but went anyway.
17:11They brought one more man, Sergeant Doc MacDonald, Mowit's orderly. Three men in a single jeep. On the
17:18morning of April 26, they tied a white bedsheet to the wire cutter on the front of the jeep, and
17:24drove
17:24straight toward the German lines. Picture this. The war is still on. Canadian and German soldiers are
17:31killing each other within earshot, and three men in an open vehicle with a bedsheet for a flag are driving
17:37directly into the teeth of the German 25th Army. Mowit later said he expected to be cut down by machine
17:43gun fire at any moment. He thought they would not make it past the first checkpoint. They made it past
17:48the first checkpoint. Cottom did the talking. His German was flawless, his manner was commanding,
17:54and the message he carried, however vague, referenced General Blazkowicz by name.
18:00The sentries were nervous but let them through. At the second checkpoint, the same thing happened.
18:05At the third, the Germans assigned them a motorcycle escort. Three Canadians,
18:09surrounded by German soldiers, driving deeper into occupied territory. By nightfall,
18:14they had reached the headquarters of the German 25th Army, a heavily guarded bunker complex,
18:20and were admitted to see General Blazkowicz. What exactly was said in that room? How many bottles
18:26were opened? And how much of the negotiation was formal versus improvised? The accounts vary.
18:32Mowit himself told the story with different details over the years, as soldiers who have lived through
18:37absurd moments tend to do. But the outcome is not in dispute. Late that night, Cottom and Mowit sent a
18:43message
18:44back to Canadian headquarters. They had negotiated a truce. The Germans would allow food deliveries to
18:49the civilian population of Western Holland. Airdrops would not be fired upon. Truck convoys would be
18:55permitted to cross the lines. Mowit later said he expected either a promotion or a court-martial.
19:01He received neither. What he and Cottom did not know was that their freelance diplomacy had been
19:06running in parallel with something much larger. At the highest levels of the Allied command,
19:11the same negotiation was already underway. And it was far more fragile than anything settled over
19:16whiskey in a German bunker. On April 28th, in a schoolhouse in the village of Okterveld,
19:22a tiny Dutch town that now sat in Canadian-controlled territory, British Air Commodore Andrew Geddes and
19:28General Freddy de Gingand sat across from a delegation of German officers. The subject was the same—food for
19:35the Western Netherlands. But the German officers at Okterveld had no authority to agree. They could
19:40only listen and report back to one man, Arthur Seys Inquart, the same man who had imposed the food
19:46embargo, the same man who had eaten three kinds of meat while his subjects starved. The decision on
19:52whether millions of Dutch civilians would be fed, or whether the famine would continue until the war
19:57ground to its end, rested with the man most responsible for creating the famine in the first
20:02place. Two days later, on April 30th, a second meeting was held. This time, General Walter Bedell
20:09Smith, Eisenhower's chief of staff, a man known throughout the Allied forces as Ike's hatchet man,
20:15met Seys Inquart face to face. Bedell Smith did not negotiate gently. He told the Reichskommissar that if
20:22the Germans did not cooperate, he would face a firing squad. Seys Inquart looked at the American
20:27General and said that threat left him cold. Bedell Smith did not blink. He said it usually does.
20:33But Seys Inquart agreed. Whether out of calculation, fear, or a sudden interest in building a defense for
20:39his inevitable war crimes trial, the deal was done. Allied aircraft would be permitted to drop food into
20:45five designated zones in the occupied West. German anti-aircraft guns would hold fire. Truck convoys
20:52would follow. There was only one problem. The agreement had been made on paper. No one knew
20:57whether the Germans on the ground—the gun crews, the sentries, the nervous 18-year-olds manning the
21:03flak batteries—would actually hold their fire when 400 bombers appeared overhead at 500 feet.
21:09On the morning of April 29th, before Seys Inquart had even formally signed anything,
21:13a single Lancaster bomber lifted off from an airfield in England to find out. The Lancaster
21:19was called Bad Penny. The name came from the old expression, a bad penny always turns up. Her
21:25pilot was Flying Officer Robert Upcott, 22 years old, from Windsor, Ontario. Five of the seven crew
21:31members were Canadian, and on the morning of April 29th, 1945, they were flying a mission unlike anything
21:38bomber command had ever attempted. The bomb bay was loaded, but not with bombs. It carried sacks of
21:45flour, canned meat, dried vegetables, and chocolate, packed in heavy paper, and stacked where 12,000-pound
21:52blockbusters normally sat. There were no parachutes attached. The food would simply fall. And to keep
21:58it from splattering across the Dutch countryside, Bad Penny had to fly low. Not bombing altitude low.
22:04Low enough to see faces on the ground. The briefing had been short. Fly within the designated corridor.
22:11Drop to 500 feet over the zone. Do not deviate. Do not carry gunners. And understand that the Germans
22:17have not yet formally agreed to any of this. That last detail bears repeating. Seys Inquart would not
22:24formally approve the food drops until the following day, April 30th, the same day Adolf Hitler shot himself
22:30in a bunker beneath Berlin. On the morning of the 29th, the truce existed only as a verbal understanding
22:36between men who had been trying to kill each other for five years. If a single German flak crew decided
22:42the agreement did not apply to them, Bad Penny and her crew of seven would be shredded at point-blank
22:48range.
22:49Upcott brought the Lancaster across the Dutch coast at low altitude. The crew could see the anti-aircraft
22:54positions. They could see the gun barrels. One crew member on a later flight described watching the flak guns
23:01track them, following the aircraft as it passed, the barrels swiveling to keep pace, but never firing.
23:07Like being watched through a rifle scope by a man who has not yet decided whether to pull the trigger.
23:13The guns did not fire. Bad Penny reached the drop zone, opened her bomb bay, and released her cargo.
23:19The sacks tumbled out and hit the ground. Below, Dutch civilians who had been told by Radio Oranje that
23:25planes would come, and who had barely dared to believe it, watched food fall from the sky.
23:31Bad Penny turned for home. The crew radioed two words,
23:35Mission Accomplished. Within hours, Operation Manna was fully underway.
23:40239 Lancasters followed Bad Penny that first day, dropping 535 tons of food across five locations.
23:48The next day, the day Hitler died and Seiss-Inquart signed the formal agreement,
23:53they dropped over a thousand tons more. British, Canadian, Australian, New Zealand,
23:59and Polish air crews flew sortie after sortie, day after day, at altitudes so low,
24:05they could read the messages the Dutch had painted on rooftops and spread across fields with bedsheets.
24:10Thank you. God bless you. Many thanks, boys.
24:14The Lancasters that had spent years destroying German cities were now saving a Dutch one.
24:19Bomb-aimers, who had dropped incendiaries on Hamburg, were lining up flour sacks over the Hague.
24:25The same aircraft. The same crews. A completely different war.
24:30On May 1st, the Americans joined with Operation Chowhound.
24:34Nearly 400 B-17 Flying Fortresses, bombers built to fly at 20,000 feet, came in at 300,
24:42their modified bomb bays packed with K-rations. Each ration box contained three meals and roughly 3,000
24:49calories. For a person who had been surviving on 340 calories a day, a single K-ration box was more
24:56food than they had eaten in a week. And that was the problem. Some of the Dutch who received the
25:01first drops could not wait. They tore open the packages and ate immediately. And some of them
25:06became violently ill. Others died. Not from starvation, from eating. It is called refeeding
25:13syndrome. When a body that has been starved for months suddenly receives food, especially food rich
25:18in fat and sugar, the metabolic shock can stop the heart. The cruelest detail of the hunger winter was
25:24that for some, the food that was meant to save them arrived just in time to kill them.
25:29Distribution was another disaster. The food fell in designated zones. But getting it from the drop
25:35fields to the people who needed it most, the bedridden, the elderly, the children too weak to walk,
25:41took days. In Amsterdam, it would take until May 10th for mana supplies to actually reach civilians.
25:47In The Hague, May 11th. People continued to die while crates of food sat in fields three kilometers
25:53away. Because there were no trucks, no fuel, and no organization left to move them. The air crews knew
26:00this. Allied planners knew this. The airdrops were saving lives. Perhaps hundreds of thousands of lives.
26:06But they were not enough. The tonnage was too small. The distribution was too slow. Three million
26:12people cannot be fed from the sky. They needed roads. They needed trucks. They needed convoys
26:18carrying not hundreds but thousands of tons, driven directly into the occupied cities and unloaded at
26:24distribution points. And that meant sending Canadian soldiers, unarmed, in soft-skinned vehicles,
26:30straight through German lines, past the hundred thousand enemy troops who had not yet surrendered,
26:35into cities they had never seen, to feed people they had never met. The operation was given a name,
26:41Faust. And on the morning of May 2nd, 1945, 360 trucks started their engines. Lieutenant Colonel E.A.
26:49De Geer set up his headquarters 300 yards from the German front line. 300 yards. Close enough to hear
26:55voices from the other side. Close enough that a German sniper, had he chosen to break the truce,
27:00would not have needed a scope. De Geer's job was to organize the largest humanitarian convoy of the
27:06war. Operation Faust would use trucks from the Royal Canadian Army Service Corps, the same trucks that
27:12had carried ammunition, fuel, and rations across France, Belgium, and the Rhineland, and send them,
27:19loaded with food, directly into German-held territory. The convoys would cross at a single point on the road
27:25between Wageningen and Rhineland. They would be unarmed, they would carry white flags, and they
27:31would drive past tens of thousands of German soldiers who were, technically, still the enemy.
27:36At 7.30 on the morning of May 2nd, the first trucks rolled. Within 24 hours, the operation had
27:43scaled to 30 vehicles crossing the truce line every 30 minutes. Twelve transport platoons, eight Canadian,
27:50four British, running 360 trucks around the clock. One thousand tons of food per day. The drivers were
27:58young Canadians. Many of them were the same men who had driven supply routes under shell fire in
28:03Normandy and the Scheldt. They knew how to handle a truck in a war zone, but nothing in their experience
28:08had prepared them for what they saw on the other side of the line. The first thing was the silence.
28:14Western Holland was a country that had stopped moving. There were no cars. The Germans had confiscated
28:20all fuel months ago. There were no bicycles. The Germans had confiscated those, too, for metal.
28:26The trams in Amsterdam and Rotterdam sat frozen on their tracks, dead and rusting. The streets of
28:32cities that had held hundreds of thousands of people were nearly empty, because the people who lived there
28:37no longer had the energy to walk. Then, the drivers saw the people themselves. In the eastern Netherlands,
28:44the Canadians had encountered hunger. Thin faces. Gaunt children. People who were malnourished but still
28:51standing, still cheering, still running toward the trucks. In the west, they found something different.
28:57They found people who could not stand. People sitting against walls, too weak to rise. People lying in
29:04doorways. People who looked at the Canadian trucks with expressions that the drivers struggled to describe
29:10afterward. Not joy, not relief, but something closer to disbelief. As if the trucks were a hallucination.
29:17As if food arriving in a vehicle was something from a world that no longer existed. The children
29:22were the hardest thing. Canadian soldiers, boys of 19 and 20, from farms in Ontario and fishing villages
29:29in Nova Scotia, stood in the backs of trucks and handed down crates to crowds that pressed forward,
29:34with a desperation that was physical, involuntary, beyond politeness or order. Mothers held up infants,
29:42old men reached with hands that shook. And the soldiers, who had bullets and grenades and years of
29:47combat behind them, found themselves doing the only thing that mattered anymore. Handing a tin of meat to
29:53a woman who weighed 30 kilograms. Giving a chocolate bar to a child who had never tasted one. Remember Tony
29:59Romain,
30:00five years old, living in Harlem. He said later, simply, we never had candy. His family had survived
30:07the winter on boiled tulip bulbs. The first sweet thing he ever tasted came from the hand of a Canadian
30:13soldier. There were thousands of Tony Romains. Tens of thousands. An entire generation of Dutch children
30:20whose first memory of kindness after years of occupation was a Canadian in a uniform giving them something to
30:26eat. Eighty years later, their children and grandchildren still tell the story. Not because
30:31it was extraordinary by the standards of war, but because it was extraordinary by the standards of
30:37what they had been living through. In a world where people had eaten their pets and burned their furniture
30:41to survive the night, a stranger handing you a biscuit was the most radical act of humanity imaginable.
30:48The convoys kept rolling. May 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th. On May 5th, the day General Charles Foulkes accepted the
30:57surrender of all German forces in the Netherlands in the town of Wageningen, Operation Faust did not stop.
31:04The Germans had surrendered, but three million people were still hungry. The trucks kept going.
31:09200 Canadian vehicles remained on food distribution missions long after the war officially ended,
31:15driving deeper into the cities, reaching neighborhoods that had been cut off for months,
31:20finding people who had not known the war was over because they no longer had the strength to leave
31:24their homes. The drivers from the Royal Canadian Army Service Corps did not fire a shot in Western
31:30Holland. They carried no weapons across the truce line. And yet what they did in those nine days saved
31:36more lives than most combat operations of the entire war. It is estimated that operations Manna,
31:42Chowhound, and Faust together saved approximately one million Dutch people from starvation. One million.
31:49But here is the part of the story that does not appear in the operational reports. The part that has
31:54nothing to do with tonnage or logistics or the number of trucks per hour. The part that explains why,
32:0080 years later, the Dutch do something that no other nation in Europe does for any liberator.
32:05They remember. Not as history. As family. In the weeks after the surrender, 170,000 Canadian soldiers
32:13were stationed across the Netherlands. They were waiting to go home. The war was over. The fighting
32:18was done. And most of them wanted nothing more than a ship back to Halifax. But while they waited,
32:24through May, June, July, August, something happened that nobody had planned for and no general had ordered.
32:31The Dutch took them in. Not as occupiers. Not as guests to be tolerated until they left. As family.
32:39Dutch families opened their homes to Canadian soldiers. They shared meals that were still meager.
32:44The famine had ended but food was not yet plentiful. And they introduced the soldiers to their daughters,
32:49their neighbors, their communities. The Canadians, for their part, were not the broken, bitter men that
32:55five years of occupation had taught the Dutch to expect from soldiers. They were young. They were friendly.
33:00Many of them came from farms and small towns. And they understood the rhythm of rural life
33:06in a way that surprised the Dutch. They played with children. They helped repair homes. They handed out
33:11what they had. And the Dutch women noticed. After five years of German occupation, after watching their
33:17own men hauled away to forced labor camps or ground down by hunger and humiliation, the Canadians looked,
33:24as one Dutch woman remembered decades later, delicious. That is the word she used. The young
33:30men from across the Atlantic were healthy, smiling, generous with chocolate and cigarettes,
33:35and utterly unlike anyone the women of the Netherlands had encountered in half a decade of war.
33:401,886 Dutch women married Canadian soldiers. Nell Griefkes was one of them. She had grown up in
33:48Amsterdam under occupation. Her father had gone into hiding to avoid being deported to a German labor
33:53camp. She had done things to keep her family alive that she could barely speak about afterward.
33:58In the summer of 1945, she met a Canadian soldier named Cecil Ringuth. They married. She crossed the
34:05Atlantic to a country she had never seen. They raised six children together in Canada.
34:10Hers was one of nearly 2,000 love stories that began in the ruins of the hunger winter.
34:15Stories that bound two countries together not through treaties or diplomacy, but through kitchens
34:20and bedrooms, and the sound of children who spoke English with Dutch accents.
34:24But the bond between Canada and the Netherlands was not built only on love. It was built on graves.
34:317,600 Canadian soldiers, sailors, and airmen died in the nine months it took to liberate the Netherlands.
34:37They are buried in war cemeteries scattered across the country. The largest is Groesbeek,
34:42near Nijmegen. More than 2,300 Canadians in rows of white headstones on a hill overlooking the flatlands
34:49they fought to free. At Holton, in the east, 1,347 Canadians lie in a cemetery surrounded by forest.
34:57And what the Dutch do at these cemeteries is something that has no equivalent anywhere else in
35:01the world. Every year, Dutch school children visit the graves. They are assigned a soldier. They research
35:07his name, his regiment, where he came from in Canada. They learn that Private So-and-So was 21,
35:13from a town in Saskatchewan they cannot pronounce, and that he was killed on a Tuesday in April 1945,
35:20within sight of the town where their own grandmother grew up. And then they place flowers on his headstone.
35:26Not once. Every year. The same grave, tended by successive generations of Dutch children,
35:32who have never met the man buried beneath it, and never will. At Holton, on Christmas Eve,
35:37the entire community turns out in darkness. Every family brings a candle. 1,347 candles are placed,
35:46one before each grave. The cemetery glows in the Dutch winter while the town stands in silence.
35:52They have done this every year since the war ended. Their parents did it, their grandparents did it,
35:57and their children will do it after them. No other liberated nation in Europe does anything like this.
36:02France has ceremonies. Belgium has monuments. But the Netherlands has a ritual, personal, familial,
36:09unbroken for eighty years, that treats Canadian sacrifice not as a historical event to be
36:15commemorated, but as a debt to be honored by name, grave by grave, generation by generation.
36:21Why? What makes this bond different? Why do the Dutch remember Canadians with an intensity that
36:27startles every Canadian veteran who has ever returned and found a stranger weeping at the
36:32sight of his uniform? The answer is not complicated, but it is not what most people expect. It has
36:37nothing to do with military strategy, or the number of towns liberated, or the speed of the advance.
36:43It has to do with what the Canadians carried in their pockets, what they handed down from the backs of
36:49trucks, what they gave away when they had no orders to give anything. It has to do with the tulip
36:54bulbs,
36:55not the ones the Dutch ate to survive, the ones that came after. During the war, while Canadian
37:01soldiers were fighting their way across Europe, a young Dutch woman was living quietly in a large
37:07house in Ottawa. Crown Princess Juliana of the Netherlands had fled the German invasion in 1940
37:13with her two daughters, Beatrix and Irene. The British had offered sanctuary, but London was being
37:19bombed nightly, and the Dutch government decided that the heir to the throne and her children needed to
37:25be farther from the war. Canada took them in. Juliana settled in Ottawa. She lived there for four years,
37:32shopping on Spark Street, walking her daughters through Rockcliffe Park, attending church on Sundays.
37:38The Canadians treated her not as a royal exile, but as a neighbor. And on January 19, 1943, Juliana gave
37:47birth
37:47to her third daughter at the Ottawa Civic Hospital. The Canadian government did something that had never been done
37:53before. It declared the maternity ward temporarily outside Canadian sovereignty, legally extraterritorial,
38:01so that the baby would hold exclusively Dutch citizenship and remain in the line of succession.
38:07The child was named Marguerite. The name means Daisy, a flower that had become a symbol of resistance in
38:14the occupied Netherlands. When Holland was liberated and Juliana returned home, she sent a gift to the
38:20country that had sheltered her family. 100,000 tulip bulbs. They were planted in Ottawa, along the Rideau
38:27Canal, and on Parliament Hill. And the following spring, they bloomed, a river of color through the
38:33capital of a country that had given the Dutch royal family a home and sent its sons to give the
38:38Dutch people
38:38their country back. The next year, Juliana sent 20,000 more, and the year after that, 20,000 more. The
38:46Dutch have never
38:47stopped. Every single year for 80 years. 10,000 bulbs from the royal family. 10,000 from the Dutch
38:54Bulb Growers Association. Tulips have crossed the Atlantic from the Netherlands to Canada. They bloom
38:59every May in Ottawa. A million tulips, in over a hundred varieties, in a festival that draws hundreds
39:05of thousands of visitors who may or may not know why the flowers are there. Here is the thing about
39:10the
39:10tulips that stops you cold when you think about it. The tulip bulb, the same object, is both the symbol
39:16of
39:17Dutch suffering and the symbol of Dutch gratitude. The Dutch ate tulip bulbs to survive the winter of
39:221944. And then they sent tulip bulbs to Canada to say thank you for ending it. The same flower.
39:29The darkest chapter and the brightest gesture. The Dutch took the thing that had kept them alive
39:34at their lowest moment and turned it into a gift for the people who made sure that moment ended.
39:39Farley Mowit came home from the war and wrote 25 books. He never forgot the jeep ride through German
39:45lines and he never stopped telling the story with varying levels of accuracy and increasing amounts
39:51of whiskey for the rest of his life. He died in 2014 at 92. Leesbeth Kalf, the seven-year-old
39:58girl
39:59who was made honorary captain by the Canadian Signals Unit in Appledorn, grew up, married, became Leesbeth
40:06Langford and moved to a life far from the war. In 2018, at 80 years old, she donated the blue
40:12sweater with
40:13the captain's insignia to a military museum in Kingston, Ontario. In 2023, she traveled to Nijmegen
40:20to meet Canadian veterans visiting the Netherlands. She was 85. She still remembered every name.
40:26And Sergeant Herb Pike of the 48th Highlanders, the man who walked into Appledorn on April 17, 1945,
40:34and could not stop staring at the faces of the people he had come to save, Herb Pike went back.
40:39In 1995, on the 50th anniversary of the liberation, the surviving Canadian veterans returned to the
40:46Netherlands. In Appledorn, 150,000 Dutch people poured into the streets to meet them. 150,000.
40:54For soldiers who had last been there as young men, now white-haired and walking slowly,
40:59the sight was overwhelming. The Dutch were not performing a ceremony. They were not honoring a
41:04memory. They were greeting people they considered part of their family. Pike said afterward, with the
41:10plainness of a man who had seen enough in his life to know the difference between sentiment and truth,
41:14the Dutch will truly, truly, never forget what the Canadians did. And they let us know that they
41:20do not forget. They keep saying they will never forget. And they have not, because they show it to
41:25us every time we go over. What did the Canadians find in Holland? They found a nation starving. They found
41:32people eating flowers to stay alive. They found children who had never tasted chocolate and old
41:37men too weak to stand. And they did the simplest thing soldiers can do. They gave what they had.
41:43They handed down food from the backs of trucks. One tin at a time. One chocolate bar at a time.
41:49One life at a time. It was not strategy. It was not doctrine. It was human. And 80 years later,
41:56the tulips still bloom. Thank you for watching this story all the way through. That means a lot. Not to
42:02me, but to the soldiers and families in it. If you think this story deserves to reach more viewers,
42:08a like genuinely helps. It tells the algorithm that this kind of history matters. If you are not yet
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42:18to know,
42:19where are you watching from? And if someone in your family served in the Second World War, Canadian,
42:25American, British, Australian, Dutch, or anywhere in the Allied forces, tell us in the comments.
42:31These stories live because people like you keep them alive.
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