@john
here’s a pic
http://www.leger1939-1940.nl/Uniform/start_uniform.htm
hope it helps
I believe the dutch were one of the few/ or only ones, who managed to recapture the airfields captured by the germans.
Neither would Rotterdam unfortunately…
Dordt in Stoom 2006
http://www.livinghistory.nl/component/option,com_zoom/Itemid,32/catid,8/
http://www.livinghistory.nl/component/option,com_frontpage/Itemid,1/
The pictures by George Eller do point out a detail I’m not sure it was mentioned before, so here it goes! Check the feature on the front side of the Dutch helmets. Engraved in it is the Dutch weapon; a lion. It was added purely because the designer thought it made the simple helmet more special.
Unfortunately, what the man (of woman) didn’t know was that by adding this feature the helmet would richochet a lot less bullets. A lot of Dutch soldiers died instantly of a headshot to the front side of the helmet. Degrading it’s protection, the lion feature often ended up in a bullet hole…
Hi Anti,
That reminds me of a story I read from Frank Fujita’s wartime experiences as a member of Battery “E” of the the “Lost Battalion” - 2nd Battalion, 131st Field Artillery Regiment, 61st Field Artillery Brigade, 36th Division (Texas National Guard) in the Dutch East Indies in 1942.
“The front trench was filled with Dutch and native soldiers, with their green uniforms on, steel helmets, American hand grenades and what appeared to be .30-caliber ammo. There were army, navy and marine officers milling around the trenches in their whites. When I saw these soldiers in their steel helmets, I could not help but recall an amusing incident with some Dutch soldiers back in Singosari [Java]. One day we were commenting about the simplistic design of their helmets, and they all bragged on them and said that they were the safest military helmets yet designed and could not be penetrated with a bullet. I had some 1903 A-3 .30-caliber armor-piercing bullets for my BARs, and got up a bet with them that I could shoot through a helmet. There was excitement while the bets were being placed and speculation was rampant, both pro and con. The Dutch hung the Helmet on the side of one of their armored cars. Everyone watched with bated breath as I drew a bead with one of my men’s rifles, and then I fired. The armor-piercing round not only went through the helmet, but went through the armored car as well. We had left behind some mighty shook up Dutch that day.”
Foo : A Japanese-American Prisoner of the Rising Sun : The Secret Prison Diary of Frank ‘Foo’ Fujita (War and the Southwest Series, No 1) (Hardcover), University of North Texas Press, 1993, p 75.
http://www.amazon.com/Foo-Japanese-American-Prisoner-Rising-Southwest/dp/0929398467/ref=si3_rdr_bb_product/104-0361313-2089526?ie=UTF8
The armored car was probably an “Overvalwagen” - built locally in the Dutch East Indies.
SEE ALSO:
Overvalwagens!
http://www.overvalwagen.com/
Dear Anti,
This is a sort of urban legend. Nice but absolutely not true.
No WWII helmet of any army was giving any protection against small arms fire from reasonable distance.
And distances were considered as such:
- 200m for submachine guns
- 400m for rifles
It mean that majority of fire fights were within these distances.
Being in the army in 70’s, I remember trial shooting. We used soviet PPS and soviet SKS. On 200m PPS bullet went right through front of the helmet and dented back side. On 100m went right through both sides.
SKS was doing the same on distance of 200 and 400m.
I can guess that guns like Mauser, Lee Enfield, Mosin and semis - Garand, SVS would perform even better than SKS, due to better ballistics of the bullet.
AKMS was going through helmets as knife through butter on any distance between 100 and 400m.
So, conclusion is - before kevlar era helmets were good only against bricks falling from no more than 5 metres.
Any etchings would make no or minor difference. Almost as much as water decal on the helmet.
Cheers,
Lancer44
I wore the Kevlar while in basic combat training for the U.S. Army, then I wore the “steel pot” in AIT. And I can tell you just by visual evidence, and the weight I felt at the end of the day, there was no way that steel pot was stopping a bullet. It might deflect a bullet hitting at an angle, but a direct head shot is going through.
The kevlar might protect at distant ranges, but I suspect they aren’t “bullet proof” either.
Actually, the sch sound in Dutch is not “hard” as in “sk”, but it is like a “sg” and very difficult for anyone but Germans to pronounce properly.
The Germans have such great difficulty with the "sch” that the test to see if someone was German or not was to get them to pronounce “Scheveningen”. the sch at the start of a word in Dutch is extremely hard. I know this, because I speak Dutch. Confusingly, if it comes later in a word it is pronounced like a long “s”. Listening to a German speaking Dutch is almost painful (although saying that I speak Dutch with an English accent, although not a strong one)
No helmet, steel or kevlar, is protection against any military rifle round at full velocity within a reasonable range, being some hundreds of metres at a mimimum.
Helmets protect against spent rounds and, more importantly, shrapnel which generally is of lower velocity than rounds.
Battle experience from WWI showed that many troops who would die without helmets under artillery would survive with them.
Australian troops almost never used helmets in Vietnam and often weren’t even issued with them. They were hot, heavy, noisy (against scrub etc) and regarded as more trouble than they were worth in aggressive and silent patrolling, which is what the Australians mainly did.
I was never issued with one as part of my kit around 1970 and never saw any Australian soldier wearing one.
There is a picture somewhere of Australians in Vietnam wearing helmets in the field under fire or under potential fire. I’ll post it if I can find it.
I saw a program on the Military Channel (cable TV) the other day showing the effects of pistol and rifle bullets fired at close range at both the modern kevlar and the WWII era steel pot helmets.
First the 9mm pistol round at each at close range. The 9mm round was deflected off the kevlar helmet, but managed to penetrate the WWII era steel pot.
Next came a Mauser k98 bolt-action rifle firing 7.92mm round at close range. The bullet went straight through both helmets - nice neat hole in front and back.
I should have said ‘any military rifle of around .30’.
I don’t know about 5.56mm, although I expect it would do the job at close range.
The penetration results obtained by the NSMATCC with the
5.56mm SS109 cartridge are impressive. The SS109 can penetrate
the 3.45mm standard NATO steel plate to 640 meters, while the
7.62mm ball can only penetrate it to 620 meters. The U. S. steel
helmet penetration results are even more impressive as the SS109
can penetrate it up to 1,300 meters, while the 7.62mm ball cannot
penetrate it beyond 800 meters. These comparisons however, do
not consider the fact that the SS109 uses a semi-armor piercing,
steel-cored projectile, while the 7.62mm ball uses a relatively
soft anti-personnel, lead-cored projectile. A semi-armor
piercing 7.62mm caliber projectile, using second generation
technology as the SS109, would easily out-perform the smaller
SS109 projectile in penetration tests at all ranges. With
respect to barrier and fortification penetration tests, the
7.62mm ball projectile can consistently penetrate two test
building blocks, while the SS109 semi-armor piercing projectile
cannot penetrate a single block.
http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/library/report/1986/MVT.htm
[QUOTE=Anti;87939] The Dutch airforce shot down a considerable number of German planes. Figures are unknown, but between 35 and 40 planes were shot down in dogfights. This number is higher than the number of Dutch planes lost during air-combat. The combined Dutch air-defences and ground forces proved to be highly effective against the massive German air armada that was sent into battle over the Netherlands. In total over 525 crashed or emergency landed German planes have been accounted for during the entire May War in 1940. Of the 525 planes on the list probably about 200 were recovered and repaired, or used to assemble new planes from their intact parts. The German loss of planes was in many ways easy to overcome, but the loss of more than half their transport fleet would remain a burden throughout the war. Amongst others in the impending operation to invade Britain…
I’d like to conclude by saying the Dutch army may have been undertrained (most mobilized soldiers weren’t even trained; all they did was digging fortifications), but they did give the Germans one hell of a fight! More than they expected…(QUOTE}
I have read the same thing regarding the Dutch air force. It acquitted itself very well and shot down numerous ubermensch flieger on the other side.
Let’s get real, when a country with a relatively large population ruled by a certifiably crazed individual who has sold a militaristic but very gullible people into believing that they are “defending” instead of merely murdering and killing to steal and pillage and that’s been working on armored warfare theory and practice for a number of years and is mobilized for war, they can take little pride in crowing and boasting about defeating an enemy that had no intention of being attacked or expectation that they would be - a country I might remind those writing on this topic, that is smaller than the King Ranch here in south Texas.
If I planned on beating up my neighbor by wearing body armor and arming myself to the teeth and walked though his open door and found him half-dressed lying on the couch watching TV, what do you think the result would be?
So the Dutch did as well as they could against a barbarian invader who actually boasts about his prowess in having attacked a friendly neighbor. Shame on that country.
A couple of words about the great armored panzers: they were impressive from a tactical and even a strategic point of view, but what is surprising is that the German army relied very heavily on horses. Where the theory ended, horsemeat began. Even at this early stage of the war, the British army was more motorized than the German one, Later, the Americans would come in with internal combustion engines attached to everything but their backsides. Blitzkrieg worked for a brief time. Surprising an enemy works a couple of times, but after that others learn the same lesson and take it to the next level- fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me.
Also, the vaunted Luftwaffe was fundamentally designed to serve as ground attack aircraft in support of infantry and to that extent they performed very well. But this is a highly tactical and ultimately short-sighted point of view. When it came time to attack England, they simply had the wrong air force with little to zero strategic capacity. In other words, the Germans depended on meeting enemies who were not on equal terms. It’s not much of a trick to defeat a 10 lb weakling. It’s a great trick to defeat someone who is as strong or stronger than you are. The minute they encountered an air force on equal or better terms, they came to decisive grief - witness the Battle of Britain. THe only time that the Germans sent a luflotte of Stukas from Scandinavia to England at the onset of the Battle of Britain, they were slaughtered by real fighters - the Hurricane and Spitfire.
As for the “invasion” of Britain, it was nothing short of a joke. Aside from the real panic and consternation and fear that the “invincible” German army raised among the British populace, the Germans simply had no capacity for carrying out amphibious warfare. The Kriegsmarine couldn’t even guarantee a corridor two miles wide. No assault ships, no Landing Ships specially designed for the mission, no amphibious tanks, the list goes on and on. Sea Lion was an operation written entirely in the subjective tense and not a serious document.
Yes.
Good summary here http://www.lonesentry.com/articles/germanhorse/
I can’t find my source for details, but I seem to recall that supplying horses with feed created severe logisitical problems at times and especially in the Russian campaign.
The Dutch contribution in the Pacific should also be noted. It was substantial, particularly in the crucial early days in 1941-42 when every Allied man, ship and plane really counted. It is largely overlooked in the dominant English-language centred histories.
A good site covering the Dutch in the Pacific is http://www.geocities.com/dutcheastindies/
That site includes details on the important naval contributions made by Dutch surface ships http://www.geocities.com/dutcheastindies/war_sea.html and submarines http://www.geocities.com/dutcheastindies/war_sea.html
After the fall of Holland the Dutch, unlike the French after France fell, did not meekly allow the Japanese into their Pacific colony but maintained their opposition to the Axis powers. After the NEI fell they transferred their army, navy and air forces to bases in Australia where they, primarily the navy and air force, continued under Allied command to make a contribution for the remainder of the war in the Pacific.
Queen Wilhelmina stiffened the resistance of the Dutch government in exile in Britain, ignoring constitutional etiquette and stepping in when her Prime Minister sought to negotiate peace terms with the Nazis in the dark early days in Europe when Germany seemed unstoppable. She realised that, for purely strategic reasons related to the future conduct of the war by the Allies rather than selfish Dutch concerns, Japan could not be allowed to take the NEI, which was then the third largest oil producer in the world. Churchill once called her “the only real man in the Dutch government”.
Great post, Rising Sun. I have been contributing on sites dealing with the doomed KNIL in Indonosiea and have always been fascinated by the forlorn defense offered up by the Perth, the Houston and the Dutch fleet under Admiraal Helfrich. I doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that the real point and purpose of the southern movement of the Japanese had but one singular objective: Indonesian oil. They desperately needed it and would do anything to get it, including starting wars with Great Britain, Australia, Holland and, fatally, the Americans. I have written a lot on the utter folly of the Japanese in attacking Pearl Harbor which if they had wanted a limited war, they never needed to have done, but which was the guarantor of Japanese defeat in the Pacific.
Thank God we had Australia and New Zealand to anchor our forces to the South!
I have an old photoghraph taken by my father in the 1930s of the USS Astoria when it called on Batavia - the exact port escapes me, because it might have been Surabya. A Dutch naval web site identified this ship for me. The Astoria, along with two others of her Class, lies at the bottom of the strait around Savo Island where it sank from Japanese naval gunfire in the First Battle of Savo Island. It’s a big world out there, but a lot smaller than we even thought then. I don’t think Papa ever knew what happened to that ship he photographed.
The bold part is a crucial comment in understanding the situation in the Pacific.
Japan’s idea of a ribbon defence through the South Pacific had a basic flaw: it had no southern anchor. They could advance all the way to Chile, but there wasn’t a point around which the Allies couldn’t go, nor anywhere they couldn’t get through by sea. It was a doomed idea from the outset. And doubly doomed, because the ribbon had a front and a back, and was vulnerable to attack from either side.
The only anchor in the south east was Australia, which Japan couldn’t take. Even if it took New Zealand it still didn’t fully anchor its defence as it was just another far flung link in the chain of islands while Australia remained in Allied hands.
Conversely, Australia anchored the Allied attack nortwards and westwards, and was an anchor Japan couldn’t get around.
If Japan had stopped in the NEI or Timor it might have had a chance of achieving its aim of holding its conquests until the Allies treated the situation as a fait accompli. It would have been better off concentrating its navy in Singapore and the NEI and its land and air forces there to protect the land and its sea lanes from the NEI, Malaya the Philippines and Burma, rather than pressing on to Rabaul to support Truk to try to control the central Pacific, and bogging itself down fatally in Papua New Guinea, New Britain and Bougainville, not to mention getting mauled on Guadalcanal which was the beginning of the end of the ribbon defence.
I think Japan really had to attack Pearl, fatal and foolish though it was, because it had to take the Philippines to avoid having the potentially hostile Americans with a decent air force sitting right in the middle of their other conquests and astride their shipping lanes. If Japan took the Philippines and left Pearl alone, it was only a matter of time before the US fleet came over the horizon, so it had to attack Pearl. Destroying the fleet at anchor in Pearl gave Japan a far better chance of holding the Philippines. Although, given the longstanding Japanese concept of the decisive naval battle with America for dominance in the Pacific, to which Yamamoto subscribed and which he tried to engineer at Midway, it would have made sense to entice the USN towards the Philippines at the outset and have that decisive battle, particularly with the advantage of land based Japanese aircraft in the Philippines. Assuming, of course, that they could do conquer the Philippines quickly enough which, as it turned out, they couldn’t. So hitting Pearl was the right military decision. In the short term. But it demonstrated just how little the Japanese understood what the American reaction would be to the attack on Pearl.
Had the Netherlands allowed Japan in to the NEI, as France did in Indo-China, at any stage before the end of November 1941, it would have alarmed America and Britain, and Australia and New Zealand more so, but it would not necessarily have led to war. In some ways it was a consequence of Queen Wilhelmina’s determination to keep the NEI’s oil out of Japanese hands, particularly once the British and Americans imposed oil embargoes on Japan, that forced Japan to embark on armed conquest in a way which brought the US into the war, to the eventual defeat of all Axis powers.
Here is a video we made with the Dutch 1940 living history group;