Operation Manna April 1945
In 1944 my Mother Jo Steenhoek was 16 years
old. She had a brother Ton, who was 8 and who had a marvellous time during the
war collecting spent cartridges, pieces of rubble from bombed houses and other
good stuff. Their father, my Granddad worked at the bank and was not sent to
Germany to work because of his age. Most men up to the age of 45 had to report
for work. My Gran was a housewife and in 1944 the survival of the family rested
upon her shoulders.
What happened was that in September 1944
the Government in London called for a general railstrike in order to make is
more difficult for the Germans to move their troops – after the war it was
discovered it did not make one bit of difference, but that is another story.
The strike also made it impossible for potatoes from the North of the country
to be transported to the West by train. By boat was no option, because the
ships were attacked by the Allied when they crossed the Zuiderzee.
For food the citizens of the larger cities
like Rotterdam and Amsterdam relied for their food-supply on the soup-kitchens,
who gave out regular rations of food. However, when the months went on, the
food became more and more scarce, especially potatoes and bread, our
staplefood.
I remember my Mum saying she went with my
Gran to the grocery-shop where you had to be a regular customer to exchange
your ration-coupons, and she saw a bottle of mayonnaise standing on one of the
shelves. She so much wanted to have it, but the shop-owner said that is was from
before the war and could not be eaten anymore. She was so disappointed.
That winter started very early and
according to Dutch standards was extremely cold. Freezing temperatures by day
and night and almost no coal to keep the stove going. What we did was find as
much wood as possible for burning, to cook as well as to keep warm.
One story my Uncle and Mum always told me
was that a tree was down because of a storm and people were hacking it to
pieces. They both went to see if they could get some wood too and brought an
axe belonging to my Grandfather. He was one of those men who believed anything
sharp was dangerous to children, so those poor kids had to hack away at a very
tough tree with a very blunt axe. Eventually they managed to get a few branches
until my Uncle said: why don’t we sit on that large branche and try to dislodge
it with our weight. Which they did, until the tree started rolling and fell
with a nerve-splitting noise into the frozen ditch. Luckily they were unhurt.
Another story of getting wood was when my
Gran saw an advertisement that a shed was being demolished and people could
take the wood they dislodged for free. My Gran went of course and upon nearing
the old shed, she saw one man on the roof sawing away, another axing at the
walls. My Gran joined in the fun, but before anything else happened, the man on
the roof fell down, taking a large beam with it and the beam hit my Gran on the
nose. Again luckily it only swelled up twice the size and my Gran got herself a
beam stinking of chickenshit. Meanwhile in Rotterdam, my Mum had called my
Grandpa at the bank, asking him to bring a handcart and meet my Gran by the
shed. When he saw my Gran walking up to him, all dirty and a swollen nose, he
remembered thinking: was that the sweet blonde girl I married?
My Grandmother used to be a seamstress
before her marriage and what she did was make caps to swap for food. The
farmers on the islands near here loved white caps and she could get potatoes or
other things from them. She was gone searching for food all day every day on
her bicycle and as I said before, she kept the family alive. She also
encountered quite some nastiness from the farmers; once she saw two men on a
newly plowed field. She asked if they had something to eat and they waved her
over. She trundled with her bicycle through the field until she came up to them
and they said: no we have nothing for you.
Another time she had her bags full of
potatoes and found it impossible to carry her bike up the dike. She saw a
German soldier coming up and thought: I am dead. However, the soldier put down
his gun and carried her bicycle to the road. Another time when she was stopped
at a roadblock near Rotterdam, she was not so lucky: a Dutch policeman stopped
her and stole all the food she had worked so hard to get that day. She was
furious and so frustrated.
In January 1945 the food was getting less
and less and people started dying, in Crooswijk, one of our neighbourhoods
alone, 7000 people died from hunger. The food from the soup-kitchens was strictly
controlled by the Health Ministry to keep unsafe things out of it. But it
became more watery and tasteless as the weeks went on. My family sometimes had
a diet of sugar beets and tulipbulbs. My Mum always said they tasted horrible,
very bitter. Recenty my Uncle said, you don’t know what it is like to wake up
in the morning before going to school and there is not even a crumb of bread in
the house. There were people who ate there dogs and cats, but luckily we did
not have to do just that. They were always hungry and because of what they ate,
my Mum said she sat in the classroom while her stomach and belly growled. To
her at that age it was really embarrassing.
Houses in those days were not insulated, so
it was very, very cold and they sat as close to the stove as they could and
stayed in bed as much as possible to keep warm there. My Gran said all they
thought about all days and at night when they could not sleep was food. Every
night they heard the drone of the bombers going to Germany and my Mum was always
terrified, because she feared being bombed. Rotterdam had been bombed in 1940
by the Germans and she remembered that to her dying day.
In March the number of dead was around
20.000 (no one knows the precise numbers) and the Government in exile asked the
Allies if they could not do anything. The Americans were opposed to food
dropping because they felt the Germans would benefit from it, but after weeks
of negotiating with the Germans, the Allies were allowed to drop food from very
low altitudes and on April 29th the first Lancasters dropped the
first load of supplies, later also joined by the USAF.
General misconception in Holland is that
the aircraft brought bread, they did not, bread was brought in by ships with
wheat from Sweden. The aircraft brought tins and food parcels. Even though the
people were dying of starvation, a tin with a dent in it was destroyed for fear
of food poisoning.
At first my family were terrified because
they thought the Allies were going to bomb, but during times of war news travels
fast and they were told the aircraft were dropping food. There was a lot of
cheering and waving from the people when the aircraft came over, my Mum said
they were so low that she could see the crews waving at her from the open
gun-positions. Those were the USAF Flying Fortresses that came later. Some
people got out hidden flags to wave at the aircraft, but everybody just danced
and screamed, so much so that my Mum said she almost fainted because she was so
weak from lack of food. But she and my Uncle always talked about all that
happened during the war and even though the times were hard, they would never
have missed it for the world. The Manna flights remained in their memories as a
miracle, a gift of food from the air. Life when they looked death in the face.
