So, I've finally decided to do a TL on the Netherlands, wanking them to a degree. I hope you don't mind my butterfly net since the main point was to have a stronger Netherlands in WW II, the period which comprises the main part of TTL, and WW II therefore needed to start more or less as we know it.
I hope you don't mind some wankishness (it's my home country after all, patriotism and all that
) and some of the nice twists I came up with in order to have the "rule of cool" apply .
The years preceding the First World War, or Great War, as it was often called, were very much essential for the future of the Kingdom of the Netherlands thanks to the shifts made in the German general staff at the time. The German Chief of Staff was Count Alfred von Schlieffen who had devised the Von Schlieffen Plan which foresaw in an encircling movement through Dutch Limburg and Belgium to pocket the French main force which he correctly predicted would be in the Belfort-Sedan region in the next war. Defeating France quickly was key since he wanted to avoid a two-front war against France and Russia.
Von Schlieffen was destined to be succeeded in his position as Chief of the General Staff by Helmuth von Moltke the Younger due to his friendship with Emperor Wilhelm II after his predecessor retired in 1906, but Von Moltke died in that same year of a heart attack. Von Schlieffen was instead succeeded by field marshal Karl von Bülow who decided against some of Moltke’s intentions to modify the Von Schlieffen Plan, mainly the violation of Dutch neutrality, but he agreed with most of them. He was under the opinion that not going through Dutch Limburg would create a difficult bottleneck for the German army and that not having Dutch railroads at German disposal would create an enormous supply problem considering the small width that the enormous amount of German troops would pass through and the limited nature of Belgian railroads. He decided to let this element remain as Von Schlieffen had originally envisioned it, but did siphon of three corps to the eastern border since he believed that the original plan underestimated Russia’s mobilization speed and he also reassigned units to fight in Alsace-Lorraine and make possible a double envelopment (this was admittedly a too optimistic scenario, but in German military circles it was received with enthusiasm). This meant that only two corps were assigned to the capture of Antwerp instead of five and that the right wing was generally weaker, contrary to Von Schlieffen’s wishes.
War did indeed erupt in August 1914 after the assassination of Austrian Archduke and heir apparent Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo which eventually led Austria-Hungary to declare war on Serbia. Russia supported Serbia and things soon spiralled out of control from there with Germany declaring war on both Russia and France, leading Germany to implement its war plan, the Von Schlieffen Plan. German forces invaded Dutch Limburg and Belgium and especially from the latter they encountered much stronger resistance than expected.
While the German First Army was able to bypass the fortresses of Liège and march on to Brussels, the Second Army was stuck until the arrival of the “Big Bertha” 420 mm siege howitzers and it took a week to break the defences of the city where the Belgians mounted an unexpectedly strong resistance. German forces swept through Belgium, encountering the British Expeditionary Force under Sir John French at Charleroi and again at Mons. The BEF fought very decently against greater forces with its well-trained soldiers being able to deliver fifteen aimed shots a minute, sometimes leading German troops to think they were under machine gun fire. The Entente powers issued a general retreat, resulting in more German victories at Le Cateau and Maubeuge. German forces approached Paris, but the commander of the right wing, general Von Kluck, passed Paris to the east rather than west as planned to pursue Lanzerac’s French Fifth Army which had escaped his clutches in the Battle of Mons. Seeing the exposed German flank, the Allies attacked and German forces retreated to the Aisne river where they dug in and it led to a “Race to the Sea”, a series of attempts to outflank one another. It came to naught and a stalemate ensued on the Western Front with trench warfare emerging after September. On the eastern front the Germans stalled the Russian advance into East Prussia and eventually inflicted a crushing defeat in the Battle of Tannenberg with reinforcements from the Western Front.
The Netherlands played but a small part in these initial stages of the war even if they did declare war on Germany, contrary to the German expectation that the Dutch would cave in quickly after a show of force. The 90.000 strong Dutch army mobilized, but didn’t do much and it was already too late to prevent Limburg from being overrun; instead they prepared their defences. The Dutch army was small, but did have some relatively good equipment in 1914 though used alongside a significant amount of older equipment, for example: 222 Krupp 125 and 150 mm guns dating to 1878 and 210 light 57 mm Krupp field guns dating to 1894, but also 304 75 mm Krupp field guns dating to 1904 and a number of 120 mm Krupp howitzers bought as recently as 1912. The Dutch also had their “New Dutch Waterline” to rely on which was a stretch of land from Muiden and Naarden on the Zuiderzee coast on to Gorinchem on the river Waal that would be inundated to prevent enemy troops from taking “Fortress Holland”. Besides this, there was “Defence Line of Amsterdam” consisting of a ring of forts and a belt of land that would flooded with 30 centimetres of water, too shallow for boats to cross. But still, Dutch forces were too small to resist a German invasion which took place in December after the final failure of the German army in France to win the “Race to the Sea”.
On December 7th, German troops crossed the border near the Dutch border town of Gennep aiming to advance quickly along the Meuse, Rhine and Waal rivers to the coast and occupy the provinces of North and South Holland to prevent Allied attacks on Germany’s northern flank from there. The fall of South Holland and the capital of The Hague that lay in it would guarantee a collapse of Dutch resistance in the northern part of the country that would be ignored in the initial invasion, or that was the plan at least. Dutch forces in fortresses in the central river delta region resisted well, but these fortifications were obsolete and quickly pummelled into ruin by German siege howitzers. Dutch troops retreated westward as the Germans advanced along the Gennep- ’s-Hertogenbosch axis, occupying much of the province of North Brabant including cities like Uden, Veghel, ‘s-Hertogenbosch, Waalwijk and Capelle after a series of engagements in which the Dutch scored some tactical victories, but couldn’t hold back the tide. The Dutch commander in chief ordered for the Waterline to be used. A lot of land in the province of Utrecht was flooded as the Dutch blew up the dykes. In their retreat behind the Waterline, bridges across the Waal, Meuse and Rhine rivers were also blown up, hindering the German advance. Dutch troops held out in forts behind the Waterline and in the Defence Line of Amsterdam which were relatively modern.
German forces arrived before the city of Utrecht (after the province of the same name) on December 29th only to find a stretch of flooded muddy swampland which was impassable for man or beast as the mud sucked them in which the 1st cavalry division found out as they tried and failed to penetrate Dutch defences around Utrecht which led to the subsequent Siege of Utrecht. The provinces of North Holland, South Holland and Zeeland thus remained as a bulwark popularly referred to as “Fortress Holland” and the Entente sent reinforcements. Britain sent two infantry divisions and one artillery battalion, the French sent five infantry divisions and one artillery regiment, and the Belgians sent a single infantry battalion. Further reinforcements came from Dutch and colonial forces in the Dutch East Indies known as the Royal Dutch Indian Army (abbreviated to KNIL in Dutch) and indigenous colonial soldiers would distinguish themselves fighting on the Western Front. These KNIL forces provided an additional two infantry divisions which were equipped by the Entente with machine guns and modern artillery, making them elite forces from the Dutch perspective. These were formed into the “Second Army” (though they were closer to a corps in size).
1915 did not see much change in the stalemate of trench warfare. The British and French hoped to cut off the Noyon salient, but this only resulted in a strategic operational failure as did the Battle of Neuve-Chapelle. Germany counterattacked at the Belgian town of Ypres using chlorine gas which caused an enormous gap in Entente lines though the Germans were unable to exploit it due to lacking numbers (partially because they had a lot of troops facing the Entente forces to their rear in the western Netherlands). The resulting Second Battle of Ypres that lasted until May 1915 did nothing to change the strategic situation. Germany had more success on the eastern front where they succeeded in overrunning Congress Poland by the end of the year, inflicting enormous losses on the Russians.
1915 was novel in that it was the first year to see aerial warfare in significant forms. The Dutch air force, which had been erected as a branch resorting under the army in 1913, participated in this and was reformed to become a separate branch of the armed forces, buying French and British aircraft such as the Vickers FB5 (the first purpose designed fighter plane) and later the Sopwith Camel, Nieuport 17 and the home made Fokker aircraft. Especially the Fokker monoplane introduced in 1917 would become a scourge to the German Imperial Air Forces though they were few in numbers. These were ordered to counter the German aerial campaign which included aerial reconnaissance and photography, but also bombings of Amsterdam, Rotterdam and The Hague with zeppelins. These aroused a Dutch patriotic fire and these bombings soon ended through the efforts of the Entente air forces, as did the similar bombings of London and Paris.
1916 was much similar to the previous year with renewed battles of attrition on the western front with prime examples being the massive bloodbath at Verdun aimed to destroy the French army (an effort instigated by Erich von Falkenhayn who had succeeded the retired Von Bülow), and the catastrophic Battle of the Somme initiated by the British in which their failures enabled the Germans to inflict monumental losses. Germany aimed to bleed France white which they did by retreating to the Hindenburg Line later in 1916 which shortened their front and released 12 divisions for duties elsewhere (read: the eastern front). Russia wasn’t doing very well with Germans in Poland and advancing into the Baltic states; enormous losses in manpower and land, scarcity of fuel and food, infrastructural failures, confiscation by the army of horses, oxen and other draft animals, and hyperinflation led to an explosive situation where political opposition could grow. This all led to the eruption of the February Revolution in 1917 forcing Tsar Nicholas II to abdicate and ending over 300 years of Romanov rule from 1613 to 1917. This was followed by the subsequent October Revolution since the new, democratic Republican regime wanted to keep up its commitments to the Entente, leading to a civil war against communist forces under Lenin and the end of Russian participation in the war.
Germany, however, wasn’t in a much better situation despite Russia withdrawing from the war. German ports were blockaded which led to similar scarcity in food and fuel, inflation and also shortages in much needed military goods such as nitrates which were needed for ammunition (stockpiles captured in Belgium were becoming insufficient). Dutch involvement in the war meant that Germany couldn’t use its ports as a windpipe to funnel goods through. By the middle of 1917, these issues were becoming very pressing and started to affect the German army as well as the home front in serious ways. American involvement from April 1917 onward due to Germany’s “unlimited submarine warfare” and especially the Zimmermann telegram to Mexico which was the casus belli (it’s debated whether it was a British forgery or not) made the German situation nearly impossible. French, American and British offensives in late 1917 were successful in driving the German army back; it had difficulty fighting back due to ammunition shortages and the troops were demoralized due to ever increasing rationing and the useless battles.
In Germany itself, political unrest developed and in January 1918 exploded into a general strike and anti-war marches led by the communists under Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxembourg. Riots and clashes with the authorities occurred in many cities while on the front mutinies erupted. German resistance collapsed and Entente forces liberated much of Belgium in weeks while the Dutch army succeeded in retaking its country by itself in a commendable performance (due to German forces mainly being redeployed in Belgium to defend the borders), liberating the Dutch people after over three and a half years of harsh occupation. The Kaiser fled to Switzerland and in Germany a republic was declared which requested an armistice in February 1918 (this also freed up troops for the unstable republic to squash the communist revolution, thus preventing a total collapse of central authority, even if unrest remained simmering in many German cities with the declaration of Soviets and the munity in the navy). Germany, Austria-Hungary, Bulgaria and the Ottoman Empire surrendered unconditionally to the Entente powers shortly hereafter, thus finally ending the Great War after nearly four years of bloodshed and nine million casualties.
I hope you don't mind some wankishness (it's my home country after all, patriotism and all that
) and some of the nice twists I came up with in order to have the "rule of cool" apply .The Little Engine that Could
Chapter 1: Lead-up to conflict and World War I, 1906-1918.
Von Schlieffen was destined to be succeeded in his position as Chief of the General Staff by Helmuth von Moltke the Younger due to his friendship with Emperor Wilhelm II after his predecessor retired in 1906, but Von Moltke died in that same year of a heart attack. Von Schlieffen was instead succeeded by field marshal Karl von Bülow who decided against some of Moltke’s intentions to modify the Von Schlieffen Plan, mainly the violation of Dutch neutrality, but he agreed with most of them. He was under the opinion that not going through Dutch Limburg would create a difficult bottleneck for the German army and that not having Dutch railroads at German disposal would create an enormous supply problem considering the small width that the enormous amount of German troops would pass through and the limited nature of Belgian railroads. He decided to let this element remain as Von Schlieffen had originally envisioned it, but did siphon of three corps to the eastern border since he believed that the original plan underestimated Russia’s mobilization speed and he also reassigned units to fight in Alsace-Lorraine and make possible a double envelopment (this was admittedly a too optimistic scenario, but in German military circles it was received with enthusiasm). This meant that only two corps were assigned to the capture of Antwerp instead of five and that the right wing was generally weaker, contrary to Von Schlieffen’s wishes.
War did indeed erupt in August 1914 after the assassination of Austrian Archduke and heir apparent Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo which eventually led Austria-Hungary to declare war on Serbia. Russia supported Serbia and things soon spiralled out of control from there with Germany declaring war on both Russia and France, leading Germany to implement its war plan, the Von Schlieffen Plan. German forces invaded Dutch Limburg and Belgium and especially from the latter they encountered much stronger resistance than expected.
While the German First Army was able to bypass the fortresses of Liège and march on to Brussels, the Second Army was stuck until the arrival of the “Big Bertha” 420 mm siege howitzers and it took a week to break the defences of the city where the Belgians mounted an unexpectedly strong resistance. German forces swept through Belgium, encountering the British Expeditionary Force under Sir John French at Charleroi and again at Mons. The BEF fought very decently against greater forces with its well-trained soldiers being able to deliver fifteen aimed shots a minute, sometimes leading German troops to think they were under machine gun fire. The Entente powers issued a general retreat, resulting in more German victories at Le Cateau and Maubeuge. German forces approached Paris, but the commander of the right wing, general Von Kluck, passed Paris to the east rather than west as planned to pursue Lanzerac’s French Fifth Army which had escaped his clutches in the Battle of Mons. Seeing the exposed German flank, the Allies attacked and German forces retreated to the Aisne river where they dug in and it led to a “Race to the Sea”, a series of attempts to outflank one another. It came to naught and a stalemate ensued on the Western Front with trench warfare emerging after September. On the eastern front the Germans stalled the Russian advance into East Prussia and eventually inflicted a crushing defeat in the Battle of Tannenberg with reinforcements from the Western Front.
The Netherlands played but a small part in these initial stages of the war even if they did declare war on Germany, contrary to the German expectation that the Dutch would cave in quickly after a show of force. The 90.000 strong Dutch army mobilized, but didn’t do much and it was already too late to prevent Limburg from being overrun; instead they prepared their defences. The Dutch army was small, but did have some relatively good equipment in 1914 though used alongside a significant amount of older equipment, for example: 222 Krupp 125 and 150 mm guns dating to 1878 and 210 light 57 mm Krupp field guns dating to 1894, but also 304 75 mm Krupp field guns dating to 1904 and a number of 120 mm Krupp howitzers bought as recently as 1912. The Dutch also had their “New Dutch Waterline” to rely on which was a stretch of land from Muiden and Naarden on the Zuiderzee coast on to Gorinchem on the river Waal that would be inundated to prevent enemy troops from taking “Fortress Holland”. Besides this, there was “Defence Line of Amsterdam” consisting of a ring of forts and a belt of land that would flooded with 30 centimetres of water, too shallow for boats to cross. But still, Dutch forces were too small to resist a German invasion which took place in December after the final failure of the German army in France to win the “Race to the Sea”.
On December 7th, German troops crossed the border near the Dutch border town of Gennep aiming to advance quickly along the Meuse, Rhine and Waal rivers to the coast and occupy the provinces of North and South Holland to prevent Allied attacks on Germany’s northern flank from there. The fall of South Holland and the capital of The Hague that lay in it would guarantee a collapse of Dutch resistance in the northern part of the country that would be ignored in the initial invasion, or that was the plan at least. Dutch forces in fortresses in the central river delta region resisted well, but these fortifications were obsolete and quickly pummelled into ruin by German siege howitzers. Dutch troops retreated westward as the Germans advanced along the Gennep- ’s-Hertogenbosch axis, occupying much of the province of North Brabant including cities like Uden, Veghel, ‘s-Hertogenbosch, Waalwijk and Capelle after a series of engagements in which the Dutch scored some tactical victories, but couldn’t hold back the tide. The Dutch commander in chief ordered for the Waterline to be used. A lot of land in the province of Utrecht was flooded as the Dutch blew up the dykes. In their retreat behind the Waterline, bridges across the Waal, Meuse and Rhine rivers were also blown up, hindering the German advance. Dutch troops held out in forts behind the Waterline and in the Defence Line of Amsterdam which were relatively modern.
German forces arrived before the city of Utrecht (after the province of the same name) on December 29th only to find a stretch of flooded muddy swampland which was impassable for man or beast as the mud sucked them in which the 1st cavalry division found out as they tried and failed to penetrate Dutch defences around Utrecht which led to the subsequent Siege of Utrecht. The provinces of North Holland, South Holland and Zeeland thus remained as a bulwark popularly referred to as “Fortress Holland” and the Entente sent reinforcements. Britain sent two infantry divisions and one artillery battalion, the French sent five infantry divisions and one artillery regiment, and the Belgians sent a single infantry battalion. Further reinforcements came from Dutch and colonial forces in the Dutch East Indies known as the Royal Dutch Indian Army (abbreviated to KNIL in Dutch) and indigenous colonial soldiers would distinguish themselves fighting on the Western Front. These KNIL forces provided an additional two infantry divisions which were equipped by the Entente with machine guns and modern artillery, making them elite forces from the Dutch perspective. These were formed into the “Second Army” (though they were closer to a corps in size).
1915 did not see much change in the stalemate of trench warfare. The British and French hoped to cut off the Noyon salient, but this only resulted in a strategic operational failure as did the Battle of Neuve-Chapelle. Germany counterattacked at the Belgian town of Ypres using chlorine gas which caused an enormous gap in Entente lines though the Germans were unable to exploit it due to lacking numbers (partially because they had a lot of troops facing the Entente forces to their rear in the western Netherlands). The resulting Second Battle of Ypres that lasted until May 1915 did nothing to change the strategic situation. Germany had more success on the eastern front where they succeeded in overrunning Congress Poland by the end of the year, inflicting enormous losses on the Russians.
1915 was novel in that it was the first year to see aerial warfare in significant forms. The Dutch air force, which had been erected as a branch resorting under the army in 1913, participated in this and was reformed to become a separate branch of the armed forces, buying French and British aircraft such as the Vickers FB5 (the first purpose designed fighter plane) and later the Sopwith Camel, Nieuport 17 and the home made Fokker aircraft. Especially the Fokker monoplane introduced in 1917 would become a scourge to the German Imperial Air Forces though they were few in numbers. These were ordered to counter the German aerial campaign which included aerial reconnaissance and photography, but also bombings of Amsterdam, Rotterdam and The Hague with zeppelins. These aroused a Dutch patriotic fire and these bombings soon ended through the efforts of the Entente air forces, as did the similar bombings of London and Paris.
1916 was much similar to the previous year with renewed battles of attrition on the western front with prime examples being the massive bloodbath at Verdun aimed to destroy the French army (an effort instigated by Erich von Falkenhayn who had succeeded the retired Von Bülow), and the catastrophic Battle of the Somme initiated by the British in which their failures enabled the Germans to inflict monumental losses. Germany aimed to bleed France white which they did by retreating to the Hindenburg Line later in 1916 which shortened their front and released 12 divisions for duties elsewhere (read: the eastern front). Russia wasn’t doing very well with Germans in Poland and advancing into the Baltic states; enormous losses in manpower and land, scarcity of fuel and food, infrastructural failures, confiscation by the army of horses, oxen and other draft animals, and hyperinflation led to an explosive situation where political opposition could grow. This all led to the eruption of the February Revolution in 1917 forcing Tsar Nicholas II to abdicate and ending over 300 years of Romanov rule from 1613 to 1917. This was followed by the subsequent October Revolution since the new, democratic Republican regime wanted to keep up its commitments to the Entente, leading to a civil war against communist forces under Lenin and the end of Russian participation in the war.
Germany, however, wasn’t in a much better situation despite Russia withdrawing from the war. German ports were blockaded which led to similar scarcity in food and fuel, inflation and also shortages in much needed military goods such as nitrates which were needed for ammunition (stockpiles captured in Belgium were becoming insufficient). Dutch involvement in the war meant that Germany couldn’t use its ports as a windpipe to funnel goods through. By the middle of 1917, these issues were becoming very pressing and started to affect the German army as well as the home front in serious ways. American involvement from April 1917 onward due to Germany’s “unlimited submarine warfare” and especially the Zimmermann telegram to Mexico which was the casus belli (it’s debated whether it was a British forgery or not) made the German situation nearly impossible. French, American and British offensives in late 1917 were successful in driving the German army back; it had difficulty fighting back due to ammunition shortages and the troops were demoralized due to ever increasing rationing and the useless battles.
In Germany itself, political unrest developed and in January 1918 exploded into a general strike and anti-war marches led by the communists under Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxembourg. Riots and clashes with the authorities occurred in many cities while on the front mutinies erupted. German resistance collapsed and Entente forces liberated much of Belgium in weeks while the Dutch army succeeded in retaking its country by itself in a commendable performance (due to German forces mainly being redeployed in Belgium to defend the borders), liberating the Dutch people after over three and a half years of harsh occupation. The Kaiser fled to Switzerland and in Germany a republic was declared which requested an armistice in February 1918 (this also freed up troops for the unstable republic to squash the communist revolution, thus preventing a total collapse of central authority, even if unrest remained simmering in many German cities with the declaration of Soviets and the munity in the navy). Germany, Austria-Hungary, Bulgaria and the Ottoman Empire surrendered unconditionally to the Entente powers shortly hereafter, thus finally ending the Great War after nearly four years of bloodshed and nine million casualties.