The city center of Rotterdam after the bombing. As part of these ground attacks, the Luftwaffe was called in to provide a precision strike on the Dutch forces.Īt the same time, negotiations were opened between the besieging German forces and the Dutch defenders for the surrender of the city.Īs part of the talks, the German commander called off the air attack, but a critical delay in passing messages ensured that only 40 of the 100 attacking aircraft received the abort message-and as a result, the city was bombed by 60 German Heinkel He 111 bombers. In response to this order, the German forces in Rotterdam prepared a combined assault for May 14, using Panzer tanks, combat engineers, and paratroopers to make an amphibious crossing of the Nieuwe Maas river upstream and then try and take the city through Kralingen, about one mile from the city center. In addition to that the air force must, while weakening the forces that up till now have supported the 6th Army, facilitate the rapid fall of the Fortress Holland.”
It is the task of the army to capture the Fortress Holland by committing enough forces from the south, combined with an attack on the east front. Political as well as military reasons demand that this resistance is broken as soon as possible. “The resistance capability of the Dutch army has proved to be stronger than expected. On the Morning of May 14, Hitler issued his “Directive Number 11: Concerning the Dutch theater of operations” in which he ordered the following: The Dutch defenders, under the able command of Colonel Pieter Scharroo, held the north bank of the Nieuwe Maas River, which runs through the city and completely blocked German forces from passing through. The fierce Dutch resistance was beginning to hold up the entire German plan.īy May 13, the German army had reached Rotterdam, but once again Dutch military resistance halted the advance. The Rotterdam bombing was an identical scenario: German paratroopers had in fact been defeated in their attempt to seize the city of The Hague-a victory by a brave Dutch army which has also passed unnoticed, ignored by the Anglo-Saxon mass media-and it was up to German ground forces to press home the invasion.ĭutch resistance elsewhere was also far stronger than the Germans had anticipated, and an attempt by the German army to seize the 20 mile (32 kilometer)-long Afsluitdijk in the north of Holland was also defeated in a two-day long battle from May 12–14, 1940. The Luftwaffe attack was therefore, part of the established rules of conflict and not a saturation bombing of civilians. The German army had laid siege to the city on September 16, 1939, and the Polish bravely-and fiercely-resisted until September 27, turning the city into an effective fortress which the Germans battled to subdue. In other words, the bombing of Warsaw took place as part of a set tactical battle. The air bombardment was an operation of the tactical offensive.” Spaight was honest in his book about the origins of the civilian bombing, and openly admitted that the Warsaw and Rotterdam bombings could not be compared to the RAF’s tactics, saying: “When Warsaw and Rotterdam were bombed, German armies were at their gates. Spaight, published a book titled Bombing Vindicated, which set out to justify the saturation bombing of German civilians. In 1944, public discontent in Britain over the RAF’s civilian bombing policy had reached record heights, and to counteract this dissent, the former British Principal Secretary of the Air Ministry, J.M. The reality, like so much else about World War II, is completely the opposite. This myth has been stated over and over so many times by the controlled media that it has become the “popular” understanding of the course of the war.
Only after all this, it is claimed, did the Germans “get back” what they had dished out.
The propaganda story goes along the lines that the Germans bombed these cities and thereby set the example of the mass bombing of civilians-and then followed this up with the “blitz” on London. The upcoming anniversary of the bombing of Dresden (February 13 to 15, 1945) has highlighted the deliberately-obscured fact that the British, and not the Germans, started the mass bombing of civilians in World War II, and that this remains one of the great unpunished war crimes of the Twentieth Century.Ī funeral pyre in Dresden, February 1945.Īs part of a general post-World War II propaganda campaign to paint the Germans in as bad a light as possible, the controlled media has always claimed that the Germans started the bombing of civilians, using the two examples of the Luftwaffe attack on Warsaw, Poland, in September 1939 and the bombing of Rotterdam, the Netherlands.
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