HOLLAND'S DESPERATE PLIGHT
Villard, Oswald Garrison
Holland's Desperate Plight By OSWALD GARRISON VILLARD MILITARY headlines have a tendency to obscure the individual tragedies of war. A great naval victory, such as we just have won in the...
...Pumping equipment has been destroyed...
...Relief trains, airplane assistance, donations in the millions of dollars would materialize instantaneously...
...More than half the population of Holland has been affected by this latest and most ruthless move of Hitler...
...Had they refused to go, they would have had to face a firing squad...
...Our imaginations, which took refuge in limbo when our millions of dollars of debt ascended to the region of hundreds of billions, can neither conceive nor comprehend the tragic picture of destitution and want and worse involved in that number of men, women and children...
...It is, therefore, well nigh impossible to visualize the situation, indeed the dire extremity in "which half the population of Holland now finds itself...
...Salt water has made a dreary waste of once-productive land and the bloated carcasses of drowned cattle are the only reminders of the life that was...
...The Innocent Victims Even now, however, should the goodness of the human heart wish to respond to an equal number of Dutch people in like unhappy circumstances, it would be powerless...
...Flood waters, disease, and death are the means of its exit...
...It would be powerless for Holland is in the grip of opposing armies, the Germans fighting with Morgen-thau-inspired fanaticism as the Allies press forward, and a vast civilian population the innocent victims of the titanic conflict...
...It speaks with deep bitterness for freshs water could have been used to flood the land, yet not destroy it...
...For to add to it is the Dutch memory of care and feeding of German children during the last world war—when The Netherlands was neutral —and Germany was famine-stricken, only to discover, when Germany attacked Holland in this war, that many of the parachutists, with their expert knowledge of the Dutch language and Dutch military positions, were those self-same children, later commercial travelers to Holland, and still later the first contingents of marauders and murderers...
...Disease and starvation are the lot of these Dutch...
...Thus is the new Europe created...
...Vast areas of fruitful farmlands have been inundated by the Nazis...
...The Dutch government in London speaks of redress from Germany...
...In order to be fair, I must say that these outriders of Hitler were unable to do otherwise than obey orders...
...We, likewise, are adding to the terror of The Netherlands by our necessary artillery barrages and airplane bombings as we seek to liberate them from their oppressors...
...The retreating Nazis chose salt water as their weapon...
...In all, some five million people may be rendered homeless...
...Prime Minister Gerbrandy, at an extraordinary press conference earlier this month in London, said more than four million Dutch people then were affected but the number since has risen...
...The most scientifically military machine the world had ever seen knew of their knowledge of the Dutch language and the Dutch countryside...
...Removed from their homes, they now crowd in areas where food Virtually is unavailable, fuel has disappeared, power facilities have been destroyed, and the first blasts of a North Sea Winter are merely chilling harbingers of others more frigid to come and to stay until April at least...
...Manhattan becomes an island of ghosts, Brooklyn and Queens are paralyzed, the teeming Bronx withers...
...at the moment only God can help it...
...Poor, desperate Holland...
...Picture, if you will, the response of the rest of the United States to this frightful news...
...Disaster Beyond Belief Thus does war visit indignity and death on a peaceful, friendly people, whose only dreams of lebensraum have been achieved at the expense of the sea and not of their neighbors...
...But the cataclysmic fury of total war is apt to dull us to national tragedies and one of unparalleled magnitude now threatens a people for whom we have had more than three uninterrupted centuries of affection and good will...
...A great naval victory, such as we just have won in the Philippines area, quite naturally produces national joy yet renders no less poignant the grief of an American family over the untimely passing of a son...
...It is small wonder that no such loathing of Nazism will exist anywhere in the world to a greater degree than in Holland...
...It renders the land useless for agriculture, anywhere from three to seven years...
...They were at once allocated to the Dutch theater of war...
...I refer to the terrible plight of Holland which, while noticed by the press, is lost in the backwash of headlines chronicling the progress of our armies, our airmen, and our fleets...
...Imagine, if you will, the skeleton-like hand of death moving over New York City...
...We were unable to do so in the case of Poland, nor can we now in the case of Holland...
...Deportation, starvation, and medieval torture were the methods used to introduce it...
...Inexorable as the hungry sea, long mastered by the industrious Dutch and now a wicked instrument in the hands of the Germans, the disaster grows day by day...
Vol. 8 • November 1944 • No. 46
