p51 wrote:
Pat Carry wrote:
Thanks for the info. It truly was a Bridge too Far!
I'd imagine the locals were quite fed up with the horrors of war by then, more so than some other regions affected by WW2. The Germans had cut off transportation to a lot of the Netherlands long before theu were liberated, and many of us here on the forum know of the campaign to drop food to starving Dutch civilians from bombers at the tail end of the war.
The Dutch
really suffered badly, something that gets glossed over in histories of WW2
The Dutch also remember. I went over in 1995 with my parents for the 50th of the liberation. We were part of a very large tour organized to bring the Canadian liberators back. Folks were billeted all over the country. The village that we were in was hosting 200 Canadians (the irony being that the town was actually liberated by the Brits, but that didn't matter to them). There are a lot of stories from that trip, but the parade in Appledorn was a major one. It was supposed to take around an hour or so for the parade of veterans to pass, it took as I recall something over 4 hours. My dad was in a truck as he couldn't march the route, but the Dutch still wanted to shake the hand of every vet. The guys that were marching ended up in single file as the crowd narrowed the street so that they could thank each one.
On the bus afterward one of the airborne vets stood up and showed everyone a card that he'd been handed by what he guessed was a woman in her 60s (would have been 10 or so at liberation). The card contained a cigarette and a chocolate bar. The card read 50 years ago you gave us your rations, its our turn to give back.
Terry
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