MILITARY (GENERAL)
This book is proof that although the Dutch may have been occupied, they were never conquered.
The book, Stepping Stones to Freedom: Help to Allied Airmen in The Netherlands During World War II, by Professor Bob de Graaff was originally published in Dutch as Schakels naar de vrijheid by SDU Publishers in The Hague in 1995 in cooperation with “The Escape” organization, a group made up of WWII helpers of downed Allied airmen. Members of “The Escape” felt so strongly about its historical contents that they gathered financial support to have it translated and printed in English for members of the Air Forces Escape and Evasion Society (AFEES) in 2003. We are grateful to Professor de Graaff for permission to reproduce the English version of the book.
One in seven Allied aviators who survived being shot down in the Netherlands were helped to safety. According to Bob de Graaff, roughly 6,000 Dutch civilians took part in the rescue operations. They included Roman Catholic clerics, veterinarians, farmers, rationing inspectors, air-defense officials, gendarmes and smugglers—all of whom joined in constructing, as Mr. de Graaff describes it, “a hodge-podge of intertwining lines” across the flat countryside.
Assisting Allied airmen, whatever the risk
The decentralized nature of the Dutch escape lines made them harder to infiltrate but, even so, it’s estimated that for every two Allied pilots saved and returned to their bases, one Dutch rescuer lost his or her life. Such was the cost that the Dutch Council of Resistance instructed resisters in 1943 to stop their pilot-rescue activities. To no avail — Dutch men and women continued to assist the Allied airmen, whatever the risk. Why? Part of the explanation is found, perhaps, in a contemporary Frisian ditty: “In the pale, pale moonlight / They bombed Berlin at night / Filling the Dutch with much delight.”
pp. 191, illusts #020623