Operation Manna comes to the Netherlands
Since 1940, Dutch citizens had lived frugally under the Nazi jackboot, but after D-Day in 1944, conditions got worse. The Germans flooded farmland, removed livestock and seized barges and trucks. Men were taken as forced labour to Germany. It was difficult to raise and transport food.
After September 1944, as the Allies began liberating the Netherlands, people living in enemy-occupied territory started to starve. The Germans, in retribution for a railway strike and the failed Operation Market Garden stopped food transportation for nearly two months, just as winter was arriving.
“Always that hunger…and then there was less and less. There remained nothing, not even in the black market,” recalled J. Vrouwenfelder, a resident of the Hague, in Hans Onderwater’s Operation Manna/Chowhound. ...
