Operation Manna April 1945

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 29^th 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.