Academic literature on the topic 'Army, Dutch, 1940'

Abstract Having easily overrun Poland in September 1939, German forces remained quiet through the winter. In April 1940, however, they roared back into action with surprise offensives into Denmark and Norway. Denmark surrendered in a matter of hours; Norway lasted several weeks. In early May, German forces violated Belgian and Dutch neutrality on their way into France. This maneuver bypassed the strong French defenses of the Maginot line, and rapidly moving armored columns drove deep into France heading for Paris. The British army, stunned by the speed of the offensive, found themselves separated from French forces and driven back to the coastline. There at Dunkirk, they stood isolated as German panzers bore down on them. Only the shift from a ground to an air attack saved the British, as a massive flotilla arrived to spirit the British away from under the noses of the German tanks.

Abstract On 10 May 1940 German ground forces invaded Holland. It was expected, and when it happened the Dutch army, small as it was, put up an honourable resistance for a few days, but obviously did not have a chance. Niko was not directly involved in this; in 1939 there had been a mobilization of young males, but he had escaped it, as his elder brother Jan had been an approved conscientious objector, and under the law all his siblings were exempt from military service. On 14 May, Rotterdam was destroyed by the Luftwaffe. It was firebombed, with many thousands killed; this was the end of the fight, the army capitulated, and German jackboots overran every corner of Holland.

Abstract On May 10, 1940, Germany began a series of coordinated offensives which brought about the surrender of Holland, Belgium, and France. It was an astonishingly successful military campaign. In a few weeks the Wehrmacht accomplished what it had failed to achieve in four years of trench warfare during the First World War. Germany destroyed the French army and set Britain’s expeditionary force on an ignominious retreat. Newly won air bases and submarine pens left Berlin in a position to increase its attacks on Great Britain. Germany accomplished all of this with remarkably few casualties. Many observers came to see the Wehrmacht’s victories as a partial product of Trojan Horse operations. The Germans opened their campaign in Holland with several coordinated strikes. In the eastern part of the country special Abwehr units were asked to seize control of bridges along the Maas and Waal rivers. These troops included Dutch-speaking Germans and thirty Dutch Nazis; their special mission was code-named “Trojan Horse.” The Abwehr commando units largely failed to accomplish their assignments as Dutch soldiers successfully destroyed several important bridges in eastern Holland. However, the Nazis secured a bridgehead at Gennep and they immediately took advantage of this achievement, pouring infantrymen and tanks through the Dutch defensive lines. The deployment of German airborne forces in the Dutch rear proved even more disastrous.

Charles Boxer, the most distinguished scholar of seventeenth-century Portuguese and Dutch colonial history of his generation, was a Fellow of the British Academy. He had been an army officer and in 1930 was seconded to the Far East as a language officer to specialise in Japanese. Boxer combined his duties with scholarly study and survived imprisonment by the Japanese during World War II. After the War, he held the Camõese Chair of Portuguese at King's College London. Boxer's most influential book was Race Relations in the Portuguese Colonial Empire 1415–1825. Obituary by M.D.D. Newitt.

Abstract Introduction: Acheson’s Effort and Failure in Asia Dean Acheson inherited a thick Asian diplomatic record that added up to something like a strategy. General Douglas MacArthur, following Washington’s instructions, was reforming the Japanese state, George Marshall had vainly attempted mediating the Chinese civil war, and the army was overseeing the creation of a state in South Korea. Washington had supervised the advent of Philippine independence. After first accepting continuation of Dutch imperialism in Indonesia, it moved to end it. It had urged Britain to resolve the festering dispute between India and Pakistan over Kashmir. And it was beginning to give Paris unwelcome advice about reestablishing order in Indochina.

Shortly after the end of the First World War, the German Navy learned that its encrypted communications had been read throughout the hostilities by both Britain and Russia. The German military realized that its approach to cipher security required a fundamental overhaul, and from 1926 different branches of the military began to adopt the encryption machine known as Enigma. By the start of the Second World War a series of modifications to military Enigma had made the machine yet more secure, and Enigma was at the centre of a remarkably effective military communications system. It would take some of the best minds in Britain—and before that, in Poland—to crack German military Enigma. The exact origins of the encryption machine that played such an important role in the Second World War are not entirely clear. In the early 1920s patent applications for a wheel-based cipher machine were filed by a Dutch inventor, Hugo Koch, as well as by a German engineer, Arthur Scherbius. In 1923, a company called Chiffrienmaschinen AG exhibited a heavy and bulky encryption machine at the International Postal Congress in Bern, Switzerland. This machine had a standard typewriter keyboard for input, and its design followed Scherbius’s original patent closely. Scherbius had named his machine ‘Enigma’, and this ‘Model A’ was the first of a long line of models to emerge. Models B, C, and D soon followed, and by 1927 Model D was selling widely for commercial use. A number of governments purchased Enigma machines in order to study them, and Edward Travis—the deputy head of Britain’s signals intelligence unit, the Government Code and Cypher School—bought one on behalf of the British government in the mid-1920s. In 1925, the German Navy decided to put Enigma into use the following year, despite having rejected one of Scherbius’s previous encryption mechanisms in 1918. Meanwhile, the German Army began to redesign Enigma, with the intention of strengthening its security. By 1928, Model G was in use, and in June 1930 Model I (Eins) became the standard version, deployed first by the army, then the navy in October 1934, and the air force in August 1935.