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Battle of the Netherlands
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The Battle of the Netherlands was part of Case Yellow , the German invasion of the Low Countries (Belgium, Luxembourg, and the Netherlands) and France during World War II. The battle lasted from 10 May 1940 until 14 May 1940 when the Dutch main force surrendered. Dutch forces in the province of Zealand continued to resist the Wehrmacht in the Netherlands until 17 May. Nazi Germany then occupied the Netherlands; the last Dutch territory was liberated in May 1945.
The battle ended soon after the devastating bombing of Rotterdam by the Luftwaffe and the subsequent threat of the Germans to bomb the other large Dutch cities if the Dutch refused to surrender.
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Encyclopedia
The Battle of the Netherlands was part of Case Yellow , the German invasion of the Low Countries (Belgium, Luxembourg, and the Netherlands) and France during World War II. The battle lasted from 10 May 1940 until 14 May 1940 when the Dutch main force surrendered. Dutch forces in the province of Zealand continued to resist the Wehrmacht in the Netherlands until 17 May. Nazi Germany then occupied the Netherlands; the last Dutch territory was liberated in May 1945.
The battle ended soon after the devastating bombing of Rotterdam by the Luftwaffe and the subsequent threat of the Germans to bomb the other large Dutch cities if the Dutch refused to surrender. The Dutch supreme command knew it could not stop the bombers and surrendered to prevent other cities from suffering the same fate.
Background
Britain and France declared war on Germany in 1939, following the invasion of Poland, but no major land operations in Western Europe occurred during the period of the Phoney War, when the British and French built up their forces, expecting a long war, and the Germans completed their conquest of Poland and Norway. Hitler on 9 October ordered to make plans for an invasion of the Low Countries, to use them as a base against Great Britain and pre-empt a similar attack from the Entente, which could threaten the vital Ruhr Area.
The Dutch were ill-prepared to resist such an invasion. When Hitler came to power, the Dutch had begun to re-arm but much more slowly than other nations; only from 1936 the defence budget was gradually increased. Successive Dutch governments tended to avoid earmarking Nazi Germany as a military threat. Partly this was caused by a wish not to antagonise a vital trade partner; partly it was made inevitable by a policy of strict budgetary limits with which the conservative Dutch governments in vain tried to fight the Great Depression, which hit Dutch society particularly hard. Another factor was that Germany was not a traditional Dutch enemy. The Netherlands had not been invaded by Germany during the First World War and remained neutral. Dutch sympathies during that conflict were on the whole more on the German side. The Netherlands and Germany, which had many cultural ties, had never been at war since the German unification of 1871, and earlier, wars between the Dutch and German states had been rare. At the end of the First World War, the Netherlands gave asylum to German Emperor Wilhelm II and refused to give in to Allied demands to extradite him, instead allowing him to take residence in a castle, Huis Doorn, where he lived until his death in 1941.
After the German invasion of Poland in September 1939 and the following outbreak of the Second World War, the Netherlands hoped to remain neutral just like they had done 25 years earlier. To ensure this neutrality the Dutch army was mobilised and entrenched. Large sums (more than a billion guilders) were at last spent on defence, but it proved very difficult to obtain new matériel in wartime, especially as the Dutch had ordered some of their new equipment from Germany, which deliberately delayed deliveries.
The strategic position of the Low Countries, located between France and Germany on the uncovered flanks of their fortification lines, made them the logical route for an offensive by either side. The Entente tried to convince them not to wait for the inevitable German attack but join them first. Both the Belgians and Dutch refused however, even when the German attack plans fell into Belgian hands after a German aircraft crash in January 1940, the so-called Mechelen Incident.
The French considered violating their neutrality if they had not taken the allied side before the planned large allied offensive in the summer of 1941. On an earlier date such a violation was indicated if Germany attacked only the Netherlands, necessitating an Entente advance through Belgium, or if, conversely, the Netherlands tolerated a German advance into Belgium through the southern part of their territory, both possibilities part of the hypothèse Hollande. After the German invasion of Norway and Denmark, both without a declaration of war, it became clear to the Dutch military that staying out of the conflict might prove impossible and they started to fully prepare for war, both mentally and physically, by taking countermeasures against a possible airborne assault. Most civilians however still cherished the illusion their country might be spared, an attitude that after the war has been described as naive. The Dutch hoped that the restrained policy of the Entente and Central Powers during the First World War might be repeated and tried to avoid the attention of the Great Powers and a war of which they feared a loss of human life comparable to that of the previous conflict.
The Dutch forces
In the Netherlands all the objective conditions were present for a successful defence: a dense population, wealthy, young, disciplined and well-educated; a geography favouring the defender and a strong technological and industrial basis including some armaments industry. However, these had not been exploited: while the Wehrmacht at the time still had many shortcomings in equipment and training, the Dutch army compared to it like David to Goliath. The myth of the German equipment advantage over the opposing armies in the Battle of France was in fact a reality in the case of the Battle of the Netherlands. On the one hand there was the modern German army, with tanks and dive bombers (such as the Stuka) and on the other hand the Dutch army, with for armoured forces only 39 armoured cars and five tankettes, and an airforce for a large part consisting of biplanes. The Dutch government's attitude towards war was reflected in the state of the country's armed forces, which had not strongly expanded their equipment since before the First World War. During the twenties, an economic recession lasting from 1920 until 1927 and the general détente in international relations caused a limitation of the defence budget. In this decade only 1.5 million guilders per annum was spent on equipment. Both in 1931 and 1933 commissions appointed to economise even further failed, because they concluded the acceptable minimum had been reached and advised a spending increase was urgently needed. Only in February 1936 a bill was passed creating a special 53.4 million guilder defence fund.
The lack of a trained manpower base, a large professional organisation or a sufficient matériel reserve precluded a swift expansion of Dutch forces. There was just enough artillery to equip the larger units: eight infantry divisions (combined in four Army Corps), one Light (i.e. motorised) Division and two independent brigades (Brigade A and Brigade B), each with the strength of half a division or five battalions. All other infantry combat unit troops were raised as light infantry "border battalions" that were in fact dispersed all over the territory to delay enemy movement. They made use of many lines of pillboxes without any depth. Modern large fortresses like the Belgian stronghold of Eben Emael were non-existent; the only modern fortification complex was that at Kornwederzand, guarding the Afsluitdijk. In comparison Belgium despite a smaller and more aged male population fielded 22 divisions.
After September 1939 desperate efforts were made to improve the situation, but with very little result. Germany, for obvious reasons, delayed its deliveries; France was hesitant to equip an army that would not unequivocally take its side and the one abundant source of readily available weaponry, the Soviet Union, was inaccessible as the Dutch exceptionally did not recognise the communist regime. An attempt in 1940 to procure Soviet armour captured by Finland failed.
On 10 May the most conspicuous deficiency of the Dutch Army lay in its shortage of armour. Whereas the other major participants had all a considerable armoured force, the Netherlands had not been able to obtain the minimum of 146 modern tanks they had already considered necessary in 1937. A single Renault FT 17 tank, for which just a driver had been trained and which had the sole task of testing antitank-obstacles, had remained the only example of its kind and was no longer in service in 1940. There were two squadrons of armoured cars, each with a dozen Landsverk M36 or M38 vehicles; another dozen DAF M39 cars were in the process of being taken into service, some still having to be fitted with their main armament. A single platoon of five Carden-Loyd Mark VI tankettes used by the Artillery completed the list of Dutch armour.
The Dutch Artillery had available a total of 676 howitzers and field guns: 310 Krupp 75 mm field guns, partly produced in licence; 52 105 mm Bofors howitzers, the only really modern pieces; 144 obsolete Krupp 125 mm guns; 40 150 mm sFH13's; 72 Krupp 150 mm L/24 howitzers and 28 Vickers 152 mm L/15 howitzers. As antitank-guns 386 Böhler 47 mm L/39s were available, which were effective weapons but too few in number; another three hundred antiquated 6 Veld (57 mm) and 8 Staal (84 mm) field guns performed the same role for the covering forces. Only eight of the 120 modern pieces ordered in Germany had been delivered at the time of the invasion.
The Dutch Infantry used about two thousand 7.92 mm Schwarzlose M.08 machine guns, partly licence produced, and eight hundred Vickers machine guns. Many of these were fitted in the pillboxes; each battalion had a heavy machine gun company of twelve. The Dutch infantry squads were equipped with an organic light machine gun, the M20 Lewis machine gun. The weapon was prone to jamming and not very suitable for offensive operations. There were but six 80 mm mortars for each battalion. This lack of firepower at the lowest level impaired the fighting performance of the Dutch infantry.
The Dutch airforce on 10 May operated a fleet of 155 aircraft: 28 Fokker G.1 twin-engined destroyers; 31 Fokker D.XXI and seven Fokker D.XVII fighters; ten twin-engined Fokker T.V, fifteen Fokker C.X and 35 Fokker C.V light bombers, twelve Douglas DB-8 dive bombers and seventeen Koolhoven FK-51 reconnaissance aircraft — thus 74 of the 155 aircraft were biplanes. Of these aircraft 121 were both operational and part of organic strength. Of the remainder the airforce school used three Fokker D.XXI, six Fokker D.XVII, a single Fokker G.I, a single Fokker T-V and seven Fokker C.V, along with several training airplanes. Another forty aircraft served with the marine air service.
Not only was the Dutch Army poorly equipped; it was also poorly trained. Before the war only a minority of eligible young men had actually been conscripted. Until 1938 those enlisted only served for 24 weeks, just enough to receive basic infantry training; that year service was increased to eleven months. After the mobilisation on 28 August 1939, bringing the army strength to about 280,000 men, readiness only slowly improved: most time was spent constructing defences. By its own standards the Dutch Army in May 1940 was unfit for battle. It simply could not stage a major offensive, let alone execute manoeuvre warfare.
German generals and tacticians (and Hitler himself) had an equally low opinion of the Dutch forces and expected that even the core region of Holland proper could be conquered in three to five days.
Dutch defensive strategy
In the seventeenth century, the Dutch Republic had devised an effective defensive system called the Water Line, which could protect all major cities in the west by flooding part of the countryside. In the late 19th century this line was shifted somewhat to the east, beyond Utrecht and modernised with fortresses. This new position was called the New Water Line. As the fortifications were outdated in 1940, it was reinforced with new pillboxes. The line was located at the extreme eastern edge of the area lying below sea level. This allowed the grounds before the fortifications to be easily inundated with a few feet of water, too shallow for boats, but deep enough to turn the soil into an impassable quagmire. The area west of the New Water Line was called Vesting Holland ('Fortress Holland'), the eastern flank of which was also covered by Lake IJssel and the southern flank protected by three broad parallel rivers: two effluents of the Rhine, and the Meuse (or Maas). It functioned as a National Redoubt, in which it was hoped to hold out a prolonged period of time. Before the war it was intended to fall back to this position almost immediately, inspired by the hope that Germany would only transgress the southern provinces on its way to Belgium and leave Holland proper untouched. In 1939 it was understood such an attitude basically posed an invitation to invade and made it impossible to negotiate with the Entente about a common defence. That year a more easterly Main Defence Line was constructed on instigation of the commander of the Field Army Lieutenant-General Jan Joseph Godfried baron van Voorst tot Voorst.
This second main defensive position was formed by the Grebbelinie (Grebbe line), located at the foothills of an Ice Age moraine between Lake IJssel and the Lower Rhine, and the Peel-Raamstelling (Peel-Raam Position), located between the river Maas and the Belgian border along the Peel Marshes and the Raam rivulet. Fourth and Second Army Corps were positioned at the Grebbe Line; Third Army Corps at the Peel-Raam Position with the Light Division behind it to cover its southern flank; Brigade A and B connected between the Lower Rhine and the Maas and First Army Corps was a strategic reserve in the Fortress Holland. All these lines were reinforced by pillboxes.
In front of this Main Defence Line (MDL) was a covering line along the rivers IJssel and Maas, the IJssel-Maaslinie connected by positions in the Betuwe, again with pillboxes and lightly occupied by a screen of fourteen "border battalions". Late 1939 General Van Voorst tot Voorst proposed to make use of the excellent defensive opportunities these rivers offered and shift to a more mobile strategy by first fighting a delaying battle with the Army Corps at the plausible crossing sites near Arnhem and Gennep to force the German divisions to spend much of their offensive power before they had reached the MDL and ideally even defeat them. This was deemed too risky by the Dutch government and the Dutch Commander in Chief, General Izaak H. Reijnders. The latter wanted a return to the original strategy of withdrawing to the Fortress Holland, but now after first offering heavy resistance at the Grebbe Line, which was also considered too dangerous by the government and had the disadvantage of having to fully prepare two lines. This conflict undermined his political position; when Reijnders was also denied full military authority in the defence zones he offered his resignation and was replaced by General Henry G. Winkelman who again made the Grebbe Line the main defence line.
During the Phoney War the Netherlands officially adhered to a policy of strict neutrality. In secret however they negotiated with both Belgium and France to coordinate a common defence in case of a German invasion, via the Dutch military attaché in Paris, Lieutenant-Colonel David van Voorst Evekink. This failed because of insurmountable differences of opinion about the question which strategy to follow. Belgium, though in principle equally neutral, had, given its obvious strategic importance, already made quite detailed arrangements for the coordination with the Entente troops. This made it more difficult for the Dutch to adapt these to their wishes. They wanted the Belgians to connect their defences to the Peel-Raam Position, that Rijnders refused to abandon without a fight. The Belgians however refused to do this unless the Dutch reinforced their presence in Limburg, for which the latter had no forces available. Therefore the Belgians decided to fight along the Albert Canal. This created a dangerous gap. The French were invited to fill it. Now the French Commander in Chief General Maurice Gamelin was more than interested in including the Dutch in his continuous front as, like Bernard Montgomery four years later, he eventually hoped to circle around the Westwall when the Entente would launch its 1941 offensive. But he did not dare to stretch his supply lines that far unless the Belgians and Dutch would take the allied side before the German attack. When both nations refused, Gamelin stated that he would occupy a connecting position near Breda. The Dutch however did not fortify this "Orange Position": in secret they decided to abandon the Peel-Raam Position immediately at the onset of a German attack and withdraw Third Army Corps to the Linge to cover the southern flank of the Grebbe Line, leaving only a covering force behind.
After the German attack on Denmark and Norway in April 1940, when the Germans used large numbers of airborne troops, the Dutch command became worried about the possibility they too could become the victim of such a strategic assault. To repulse an attack, infantry battalion were positioned at the main airbases, such as The Hague airfield of Ypenburg and the Rotterdam airfield of Waalhaven. These were reinforced by additional AA-guns, two tankettes and twelve of the 24 operational armoured cars. These specially directed measures were accompanied by more general ones: the Dutch had posted no less than 32 hospital ships throughout the country and fifteen trains to help make troop movements easier.
German strategy and forces
During the many changes in the operational plans for Fall Gelb it was at times considered to leave the Fortress Holland alone, just as the Dutch hoped for. On 15 November 1939 it was, in the so-called Holland-Weisung, decided to advance no further than the Grebbe Line and occupy the Frisian Isles. However Hermann Goering insisted on a full conquest as he needed the Dutch airfields against Britain; also he was afraid the Entente might after a partial defeat reinforce Fortress Holland and use the airfields to bomb German cities and troops. A third reason for the complete conquest was that as the fall of France itself could hardly be taken for granted, it was for political reasons seen as desirable to obtain a Dutch capitulation, because yet another debacle for the policy of the Entente might well bring less hostile governments to power in Britain and France. A swift defeat would also free troops for other front sectors.
Though it was thus decided to conquer the whole of the Netherlands, few units could be made available for this task. The main effort of Fall Gelb would be made in the centre, between Namur and Sedan. The attack at central Belgium was only a feint; and the attack at Fortress Holland only a side show of this feint. Although of Army Group B 6th and 18th Army were deployed at the Dutch border, the first, much larger, force would move south of Venlo to Belgium, leaving just 18th Army under General Georg K.F.W von Küchler to defeat the Dutch main force. Of all German armies to take part in the operation this was by far the weakest. It contained only four regular infantry divisions (207th, 227th, 254th and 256th ID), assisted by three reserve divisions (208th, 225th, and 526th ID) that would not take part in the fighting. Six of these divisions were "Third Wave" units only raised in August 1939 from territorial Landwehr units. They had few professional officers and had little fighting experience apart from those among the 42% men over forty that were WWI-veterans. Like the Dutch Army most soldiers (88%) were insufficiently trained. The seventh was 526th ID, a pure security unit without any serious combat training. Even when accounting for the fact that the German divisions, with a nominal strength of 17,807 men, were half as large as their Dutch counterparts and possessed twice times their effective firepower, the necessary numerical superiority for a successful offensive was simply lacking.
To remedy this, assorted odds and ends were used to reinforce 18th Army. The first of these was the only German cavalry division, aptly named 1st Kavalleriedivision. The mounted troops of this unit, accompanied by some infantry, were to occupy the weakly defended provinces east of the river IJssel and then try to cross the Afsluitdijk (Enclosure Dike) and simultaneously attempt a landing in Holland, near Enkhuizen, using barges to be captured in the small port of Stavoren. As both efforts were unlikely to succeed, the mass of regular divisions was reinforced by the SS-Verfügungsdivision (including SS-Standarten Der Führer, Deutschland and Germania) and Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler, which would serve as assault infantry to breach the Dutch fortified positions. Still this added only 1 1/3 division to the equation. To ensure a victory the Germans resorted to more unconventional means.
The Germans had trained two airborne/airlanding assault divisions. The first of these, 7th Fliegerdivision, consisted of paratroopers; the second, 22nd Luftlande-Infanteriedivision, of airborne infantry. First, when the main German effort was still to take place in Flanders, it was considered to use these for a crossing attempt over the river Scheldt near Ghent. This operation was consequently cancelled and it was now decided to use them to obtain an easy victory in the Netherlands. The airborne troops would on the first day secure the airfields around the Dutch seat of government, The Hague, and then capture that government, together with the Dutch High Command and the Dutch Queen Wilhelmina. German officers actually took lessons on how to address royalty on such occasions. In case this would not bring forth the desired immediate collapse, the bridges at Rotterdam, Dordrecht and Moerdijk would simultaneously be secured to allow a mechanised force to relieve the airborne troops from the south. This force was to be 9th Panzerdivision, with 141 combat tanks the weakest of all German armoured divisions, that was to exploit a breach in the Dutch MDL created by 254th and 256th ID, together forming XXVI. Armeekorps, on the Gennep - 's-Hertogenbosch axis. At the same time a holding offensive would be staged against the Grebbe Line in the east by 207th and 227th ID, united in X. Armeekorps. Eighteenth Army expected, if the Dutch would not already capitulate on the first day, to enter the Fortress Holland on the third day from the south and thereby ensure victory; there was no strict time table for the total destruction of Dutch forces. A peculiar aspect of the command structure was that the airborne attack on The Hague was solely a Luftwaffe operation; the airborne forces there would not be under operational command of the German Army — but the attack on Rotterdam was ultimately to be an Army operation and considered by it as the Schwerpunkt of the campaign in the Netherlands; 18th Army saw the airlandings as primarily subservient to the XXVI. AK advance.
Of all operations of Fall Gelb this one most strongly embodied the concept of a Blitzkrieg as the term was then understood: a Strategischer Überfall or strategic assault. And like Fall Gelb as a whole it was a gigantic gamble. The gamble would fail, but the Dutch would pay the price.
The Oster affair
The German population and troops generally disliked the idea of violating Dutch neutrality. The German propaganda therefore justified the invasion as a reaction to an Entente attempt to occupy the Low Countries. Some German officers had an aversion against the Nazi regime and shared the uneasiness about the invasion. One of them, Colonel Hans Oster, an Abwehr (German intelligence) officer, informed his friend, the Dutch military attaché in Berlin Major Gijsbertus J. Sas, of the date of the attack. The Dutch government in turn informed the Allies. However, as the date would be changed many times, because it was postponed to wait for favourable weather conditions, the other nations became insensitive to the series of false alarms. When in the evening of 9 May Oster again phoned his friend saying just "Tomorrow, at dawn", only the Dutch troops were put on alert.
The battle
10 May
On the morning of 10 May, 1940 the Dutch awoke to the sound of aircraft engines roaring in the sky. Nazi Germany had commenced operation Fall Gelb and attacked the Netherlands, Belgium, France and Luxembourg; in the case of the Low Countries without a declaration of war given before hostilities; France already was at war.
In the night the Luftwaffe violated Dutch airspace. One squadron, KG 4, traversed it and then disappeared to the west, giving the Dutch the illusion that the operation was directed to England. But above the North Sea it turned to the east again to stage a surprise attack on the Dutch airfields, together with the other squadrons. A dozen Dutch aircraft were destroyed on the ground. The Dutch planes that were able to take off shot down thirteen German aircraft, but most were lost during the fighting or by emergency landings necessitated by the fact that the airforce facilities had come under ground attack.
Immediately after the bombardments, between 04:30 and 05:00 AM, paratroopers were landed near the airfields. Dutch AA batteries shot down numerous Ju-52 transport planes of the Luftwaffe's Transportgruppen. German Ju 52 losses in the entire battle amounted to 125 destroyed and 47 damaged, representing 50% of the fleet's strength.
The attack on The Hague ended in operational failure. The paratroopers were unable to capture the main airfield, Ypenburg, in time for the airborne infantry to land safely in their Junkers. Though one armoured car had been damaged by a bomb, the other five Landsverks, assisted by machine gun emplacements, destroyed the eighteen Junkers of the first two waves, killing many occupants. When the airstrip was blocked by wrecks the remaining waves aborted the landing and tried to find alternatives, often putting down their teams in meadows or on the beach, thus dispersing the troops. The small auxiliary airfield of Ockenburg that was only lightly defended, fell at once to the German attack. The airfield of Valkenburg was likewise quickly occupied, the morale of the defenders shaken by the bombardment, but proved to be still under construction and unmetalled: those planes landing there sank away in the soft soil. None of the airfields was thus capable of receiving substantive reinforcements. In the end the paratroopers occupied Ypenburg but failed to advance into The Hague, their route blocked by hastily assembled Dutch troops. Early in the afternoon they were dispersed by fire by three Dutch artillery batteries. Dutch batteries likewise drove away the German occupants from the other two fields, the remnant airborne troops taking refuge in nearby villages and mansions.
The attack on Rotterdam was much more successful. Twelve Heinkel He-59 seaplanes, crowded with ninety men, landed in the heart of the city and unloaded assault teams that conquered the Willemsbrug, a bridge over the Nieuwe Maas, to occupy a bridgehead. At the same time the military airfield of Waalhaven, positioned south of the city on the island of IJsselmonde, was attacked by airborne forces. Here an infantry battalion was stationed, but so close to the airfield that the paratroopers landed near its positions. A confused fight followed. Four planes of the first wave of Junkers were destroyed but this time the transports continued to land. In the end the Dutch defenders and tankettes were overwhelmed. The German troops, steadily growing in numbers, began to move to the east to occupy IJsselmonde and eventually make contact with the paratroopers that had to occupy the vital bridge at Dordrecht. Although the Royal Dutch Navy intervened, first the torpedo boats Z5 and TM 51 attacking the Willemsbrug and then the destroyer Hr.Ms. Van Galen sailing up the Nieuwe Waterweg to bombard the airfield at short range, this only resulted in the Van Galen foundering after being bombed. A plan to commit the gunboats Hr.Ms. Flores and Hr.Ms. Johan Maurits van Nassau was therefore abandoned At the Island of Dordrecht the Dordrecht bridge was captured but in the city itself the garrison held out. The long Moerdijk bridges over the broad Hollands Diep estuary connecting the island to North Brabant province were captured and bridgeheads fortified on both sides.
The Germans tried to capture the IJssel and Maas bridges intact, using commando teams of Brandenburgers that began to infiltrate over the Dutch border previous to the main advance, in some occasions already in the evening of 9 May. In the night of 10 May they approached the bridges: several teams had a few men dressed as Dutch military police and pretending to bring in a group of German prisoners, so to fool the Dutch detonation teams. Some of these "military policemen" were real Dutchmen, members of the Nationaal-Socialistische Beweging, the Dutch nazi party. Most of these attempts failed and the bridges were blown, on two occasions with Brandenburgers and all. The main exception was the Gennep railway bridge. Immediately two armoured trains crossed it, drove right through the Peel-Raam Position at Mill and unloaded an infantry battalion behind the defence line.
The Dutch released the reports of German soldiers in disguise to the international news agencies. This caused a fifth column scare, especially in Belgium and France. However, unlike the situation later on in those two countries, in the Netherlands there was no mass exodus of civilian refugees, clogging the roads. Generally German soldiers behaved correctly towards the Dutch population, forming neat queues at the shops to buy goods rationed in Germany, such as chocolate.
After the generally failed assaults on the bridges, the German divisions began crossing attempts over the rivers IJssel and Maas. The first waves typically were destroyed, due to insufficient preparatory fire on the pillboxes. A secondary bombardment at most places destroyed the pillboxes and the infantry divisions crossed the river after building pontoon bridges; but at some, as Venlo, the attempt was aborted. At Arnhem, Leibstandarte Der Fuehrer lead the assault and that day advanced to the Grebbe Line, followed by 207. Infanteriedivision.
Even before the armoured train arrived, 3rd Army Corps was already planned to be withdrawn from the Peel-Raam Position taking with it all the artillery apart form 36 8 Staal pieces, though each of its six regiments would leave a battalion behind to serve, together with fourteen "border battalions", as a covering force, called the "Peel Division". This was to have taken place during the first night after the invasion, under cover of darkness, but due to the rapid German advance an immediate retreat was ordered at 06:45 AM, to avoid 3rd Army Corps becoming entangled with enemy troops. The corps joined six battalions already occupying the Waal-Linge line — and was thus brought up to strength again: but placing itself in a position in which it could have no further influence on the battle, a quarter of the field army had effectively rendered itself impotent.
The Light Division, based at Vught, was the only mobile reserve the Dutch Army possessed. It was decided to let it counterattack the German airborne landing on IJsselmonde. Its regiments thus biked over the Maas and Waal bridges and then turned left through the Alblasserwaard, to reach the Noord, the river separating this polder from IJsselmonde, in the evening. There they discovered that the sector near the only bridge, built in 1939, was not strongly occupied by the airborne troops, as the Germans because of outdated maps simply had not known of its existence. It was however decided to postpone a crossing-attempt till the next day, when the artillery would be ready to support it. No attempt was made to establish a bridgehead.
Meanwhile, on the evening of the 10th, around 22:00, the first elements of the French 1st Mechanised Light Division, reconnaissance elements using the Panhard 178 armoured car had started to arrive at the Dutch border. This division was the most northern part of the French 7th Army; its mission was to ensure contact between the Vesting Holland and Antwerp. Attempts to coordinate its advance with the military commander of the Dutch troops on Noord-Brabant, Colonel Leonard Johannes Schmidt were largely unsuccessful however, as, apart from from the fact he could not be reached that day, Dutch defences there were already collapsing. At Mill, 256. Infanteriedivision at first could not exploit the opportunity offered by having a battalion in the back of the defenders because it failed to locate it. An assault at the MDL was initially postponed to the next day because most artillery had not yet passed the single pontoon bridge over the Meuse, clogged by a traffic congestion. In the early evening in a sudden change of plans it was decided to attack even though artillery support was absent apart from one 105 mm battery. An unrequested Stuka attack that also hit the Mill sector, then just prior to the advance routed some Dutch defenders, creating a weak sector in the line, from which the Dutch troops were dislodged. The Germans were slow to exploit the breakthrough but Colonel Schmidt at 20:30 ordered the Peel-Raam Position to be abandonded and his troops to fall back to the west on the Zuid-Willemsvaart, a canal.
In the North, by the end of the day, 1. Kavalleriedivision had reached the line Meppel - Groningen, more delayed by logistical problems and Dutch demolition teams blowing up 236 bridges than by the weak border troops.
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