- 2 days ago
Why did Canadian officers trust German guards with Holland’s food? Because in the final days of the war, a carefully built bargain made keeping the promise the Germans’ only sensible road home. This WW2 military history story follows Canadian trucks flying white flags into German-held territory, carrying biscuits, tinned meat, condensed milk, and other supplies for starving Dutch civilians.
The story unfolds through the negotiations led by Lieutenant-General Charles Foulkes, the white-sheet jeep ride of Canadian officers into enemy lines, and the tense talks that opened neutral corridors across the Grebbe Line. German soldiers were then assigned to guard the food dumps, while Canadian and Dutch crews kept the relief convoys moving. It is a striking account of wartime diplomacy, humanitarian aid, and the uneasy trust that helped feed the Netherlands in the hunger winter’s aftermath.
For listeners who enjoy Canadian war stories, WW2 history, military negotiation, and narrated historical documentary-style storytelling, this episode offers a gripping look at supply convoys, ceasefires, and the liberation of Holland. It also fits searches for world war 2 stories, Canadian army history, Dutch liberation, and wartime food relief.
SEO: WW2 military history, Canadian war stories, narrated history, Dutch liberation, Holland food relief, wartime negotiations, Canadian army, world war 2 documentary, military history storytelling, historical narration for history fans.
The story unfolds through the negotiations led by Lieutenant-General Charles Foulkes, the white-sheet jeep ride of Canadian officers into enemy lines, and the tense talks that opened neutral corridors across the Grebbe Line. German soldiers were then assigned to guard the food dumps, while Canadian and Dutch crews kept the relief convoys moving. It is a striking account of wartime diplomacy, humanitarian aid, and the uneasy trust that helped feed the Netherlands in the hunger winter’s aftermath.
For listeners who enjoy Canadian war stories, WW2 history, military negotiation, and narrated historical documentary-style storytelling, this episode offers a gripping look at supply convoys, ceasefires, and the liberation of Holland. It also fits searches for world war 2 stories, Canadian army history, Dutch liberation, and wartime food relief.
SEO: WW2 military history, Canadian war stories, narrated history, Dutch liberation, Holland food relief, wartime negotiations, Canadian army, world war 2 documentary, military history storytelling, historical narration for history fans.
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LearningTranscript
00:00May 2, 1945. Early morning. On the road that runs west from Wageningen toward Rennen,
00:08at the edge of the part of the Netherlands the Germans still held, a column of Canadian
00:13three-ton trucks was rolling toward the German line. In the lead was Captain Robert Parkinson
00:20of the Royal Canadian Army Service Corps. Twenty-eight years old, from Victoria, British Columbia,
00:27a university graduate who had spent the war moving supplies behind the front. This morning,
00:33he was not behind the front. He was driving straight through it. Every truck in his platoon
00:40flew a white flag. Every driver had the same order. Do not leave the cab. Not to stretch your legs,
00:49not to light a cigarette, not for any reason. And every driver had a weapon with him,
00:55kept out of sight, where a German looking up through the windscreen would not see it.
01:01White flags on the trucks. Weapons hidden in the cabs. That was how far anyone trusted this road.
01:09Then the Germans were there. Not prisoners. Not men with their hands up. Soldiers of an army that had
01:17not surrendered, standing at the roadside with rifles in their hands, watching Canadian trucks
01:22pass close enough to see the faces in the cabs. Parkinson remembered it later in the plainest words he had.
01:29It was interesting, and somewhat scary, as we passed German soldiers who were fully armed.
01:36Now listen to what was in those trucks, because it is the whole story.
01:41Biscuits. Tinned meat. Condensed milk. Sugar. Salt. Food for people on the other side of that line
01:50who had spent the winter eating tulip bulbs. And here is the part I want you to hold on to.
01:56When the truck stopped, the cargo came down at the roadside, in a strip of no-man's land.
02:03The Canadians turned around and drove back. The food stayed.
02:07And the men who had promised to stand guard over it, to keep it from the starving crowds
02:12and from their own hungry soldiers, were German. The same army that had starved Holland was now
02:19guarding Holland's food. And the Canadians had agreed to it. Why?
02:25If what the Canadians did in Holland in that last spring of the war matters to you,
02:30a subscribe helps these stories reach more people.
02:34The man who made that decision had done it the day before.
02:39Lieutenant General Charles Foulkes, commander of 1st Canadian Corps,
02:44had sat across from a German general named Paul Reichelt,
02:48chief of staff of the German army in the Netherlands, and laid out his terms.
02:53Neutral corridors, north and south. Every soldier inside them to stand fast. No patrols. No weapon
03:04fired. Of any kind. And one more line. The one that put Parkinson's cargo in German hands.
03:13Reischelt would provide guards for the food dumps. Guards against starving civilians. Guards against his own men.
03:23Foulkes had no illusions about the men across that table.
03:27Of one German general he faced that week, he later said publicly,
03:32the stupidest soldier I ever dealt with. He had no reason to trust any of them.
03:38So why did he hand them the one thing in Holland worth more than gold?
03:43Think about what that line asked of a German private standing at a dump in Rheinen.
03:49He had his own stomach to think about. His army had been living off this country for five years.
03:56And now, a Canadian general expected him to stand with a rifle between a pile of tinned meat and his
04:02own comrades, and let it all go west to the Dutch. Either Foulkes had found something that made that
04:09promise worth more than a German's hunger, or he had just bet a starving country on an enemy's word.
04:16To understand that bet, you have to see what was on the other side of the line,
04:21and what was on the German side of the table. In September 1944, the Dutch government in London
04:28called a railway strike to help the allied advance. The advance stopped at Arnhem, the strike went on,
04:35and the Germans answered it by cutting off food to the cities of the west. Amsterdam, Rotterdam,
04:43The Hague, Utrecht. Then the winter came down hard. The Eiselmere froze before Christmas,
04:50and the food barges stopped. In Amsterdam, people cut down the trees along the streets and burned them.
04:58They ate sugar beets. By April, people in the western cities were dying by the score,
05:06and somewhere around 20,000 Dutch civilians would be dead of hunger before it was over.
05:14Now set that against the Canadian position. In the last week of April, Foulkes' corps had come to a
05:22halt in front of the Grebe line, an old Dutch defensive line now held by the German 25th Army.
05:30Behind it lay the starving cities. Every day the Canadians waited, more people behind that line
05:39died. The Canadians could see the way in. They did not take it. It was not the German guns that
05:47stopped
05:48them. The Germans had already shown what they would do if the Canadians kept coming. And it had not
05:55required a single shot. What the Germans had done, and were ready to do again, is the reason the
06:01Canadians stopped. And it is why, a week before Parkinson's convoy, two Canadian officers tied a
06:10white sheet to the front of a jeep and drove into the German lines on the strength of one vague
06:16message.
06:18One of them said afterward he expected to be shot at any moment. April 17, 1945. The Wieringermier,
06:26in the north of Holland. Farmland the Dutch had taken back from the sea within living memory.
06:33That day, German troops blew open the dike. They did not need a battle to do it. A breach in
06:40the dike
06:41and the water did the rest. It spread across the polder and kept spreading, until almost 200 square
06:48kilometers were under it. Farmhouses, barns, fields that should have been planted that spring to feed the
06:56starving west. Hold that picture. Every decision on the Canadian side over the next three weeks was made in
07:05its shadow. The Wieringermier was not the only warning. In front of the Canadian line, the German
07:12command had already ordered the Eam and Grebe rivers breached, and the German governor of the occupied
07:19Netherlands, Reichskommissar Arthur Seis Ingvar had spelled out the rest. Attack the Grebe line,
07:27and a major dike between Rotterdam and Gouda would go. The water would run north, all the way to
07:35Amsterdam. So put yourself in Volks's position in the last week of April. Push west, and you fight street
07:43by street through Dutch cities full of starving civilians, while the Germans let the water in
07:49behind you. Stay where you are, and the people you came to free keep dying in their kitchens.
07:55There was no clean military answer to that. Volks held his divisions where they stood. Along the Grebe
08:03line, the shooting faded into an informal quiet that neither side had signed, and neither side wanted
08:10to be the first to break. That quiet is where the two officers with the white sheet come in.
08:16In the last days of April, a message reached Canadian intelligence. It was vague. It was said
08:23to come from the German command, and it said, in effect, that General Johannes Blazkowicz,
08:30commander of the German 25th Army, wanted to talk about food for the civilians behind his lines.
08:36Two men decided to go and find out what it meant. Major Ken Cottom, British-born, fluent in German,
08:45and Captain Farley Mowat, 23, from Belleville, Ontario, an infantry officer turned intelligence
08:52officer, the same Farley Mowat who would one day become one of the best-known writers in Canada.
08:59With them went Mowat's sergeant, Doc McDonald. On April 26th, they took one jeep. On the steel bar
09:07at the front, the one meant to snap wires strung across the road, they tied a large white sheet.
09:14Then they drove toward the German lines. Mowat said he expected to be shot at any moment. He had reason
09:22to.
09:23A white sheet is only a flag if the man behind the machine gun decides it is one.
09:29At the checkpoints, Cottom did the talking. Fluent German, a great deal of confidence,
09:35and a message that promised nothing. It was enough. They got past one nervous checkpoint,
09:42then another. At one point, the Germans gave them a motorcycle escort. By the end of the day,
09:48they were inside the heavily guarded headquarters of the 25th Army, and they were taken in to see
09:54Blazkowicz himself. What was said in that room, we do not have word for word. What we have is the
10:02result. Late that night, there was an understanding. The Germans would allow food to reach the people.
10:09On April 27th, the two officers reported to their headquarters that they had a truce. Mowat expected
10:16either a promotion or a court-martial. He got neither. The generals were already talking through
10:23channels of their own. But notice what had just happened, because it is the first layer of our
10:28answer. The first Canadians to trust the Germans with Holland's food did not start by trusting them
10:35with food. They trusted them with their own lives, behind a bed sheet. And the Germans let them through,
10:41not out of kindness. An army at war does not escort two enemy officers to its commanding general unless
10:49it wants something from them. Remember that. What the Germans wanted is the hinge of this entire story.
10:57Two days later, the bet went into the air. On April 29th, a Lancaster bomber called Bad Penny took off
11:05from
11:05England with food where its bombs should have been. Seven men aboard, five of them Canadian, among them
11:12the pilot, Robert Upcott of Windsor, Ontario. Their job was to fly low over German-held Holland,
11:20past German anti-aircraft guns, and find out whether the promise was real. Here is the detail that matters.
11:28The formal German order to hold fire on the food flights was not issued until the next day. Bad
11:35Penny flew before it existed. Seven men flying over German guns on the strength of a promise that had
11:43not yet been written down. The crew made their drop and radioed home two words, mission accomplished.
11:50Not a shot had been fired. So the Germans could keep a promise when it suited them. The question folks
11:57now
11:58had to answer was harder. What happens when it stops suiting them? On April 30th,
12:04Volks led a column of staff cars into the village of Achterveld, to a school on the edge of the
12:10front
12:10line, and walked in to face Seis Inquart himself, the man who had threatened to drown the west. Around
12:19that table, and the one that followed, the Germans would make him an offer. It was so small and so
12:26hedged
12:27that Volks had one word for it. And what he did after he said that word, decided whether Parkinson's
12:34trucks would ever roll at all. April 30th, 1945. Achterveld, a village sitting right on the Grebelein,
12:43under a gray sky that turned to rain. The motorcade came in from the Canadian side, a military police
12:50jeep in front, behind it, a big 1936 McLaughlin Buick, built in Oshawa, Ontario, and marked for
12:58the headquarters of 1st Canadian Corps. Then the Germans, a Ford sedan, a staff wagon, Jeeps.
13:07There is film of this. Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands shot it himself, in color. Watch the
13:14Canadian soldiers along the road. They salute as the Buick goes by. Then the Ford comes past with
13:20the Germans in it, and the hands come down. Charles Foulkes walked through the school gate ahead of
13:26the entire German party. Behind him, Seis Inquart kept his eyes on his feet. One of the German officers
13:33raised a hand to hide his face from two people watching from a window. The school had two sets of
13:40doors. The Germans used the north doors. The Allies used the south. When lunch was arranged in tents
13:47outside, the Canadian order was blunt. Under no circumstances were the German representatives to
13:54be included. They ate separately, inside the school. Hold on to that, because it tells you the temperature
14:01in the room. Nobody at Achterveld was making friends. Across the table from Seis Inquart sat General
14:09Walter Bedell Smith, Eisenhower's Chief of Staff, with Montgomery's Chief of Staff, Prince Bernhard,
14:17two Soviet officers, and Foulkes with his own staff, Brigadier George Kitching among them.
14:23Kitching looked at the Reich's Commissar and saw an unpleasant man with cold eyes and a cruel face.
14:29Bedell Smith did not bother with diplomacy. According to the report kept by 1st Canadian Corps,
14:35he told Seis Inquart, whatever happens, you will be shot dead. Seis Inquart answered,
14:43that leaves me cold. And Bedell Smith said, and so it will too. Montgomery's Chief of Staff remembered
14:51the German's reply a little differently. I am not afraid, he said. I am a German.
14:57Now watch Seis Inquart's deputy, Ernst Schwebel. Foulkes noticed that when Schwebel came face to
15:05face with the Soviet colonel, Ivan Zenkovich, he broke into a cold sweat. Remember that sweat.
15:13These men could sit through an American general promising their chief a bullet. What made them
15:19sweat was a Russian. Then came the business, and this is where Foulkes earned his place in the story.
15:27His position was simple. The food convoys had to pass unmolested. That meant a truce over the whole
15:35battlefront, from the Wall River to the Eiselmere. Not a corridor, the whole front. The German general
15:43across from him, Hermann Plaucker, reacted with alarm. A proposal like that, he said, needed higher
15:50authority. What the Germans offered instead was one road, open for a few hours a day. This was the
15:59general Foulkes would later call the stupidest soldier he ever dealt with. Foulkes called the offer
16:06ludicrous. Stop for a moment and think about why. Because on the surface, the German offer looks
16:12reasonable. It looks careful. One road, a few hours, everything under control. A cautious general
16:21might have taken it and called it a start. But look at it from the cab of a truck. One
16:26road means
16:27every convoy runs down a single line the Germans can close at will. A few hours a day means the
16:34trucks
16:34bunch up at the barrier, waiting for a German officer to lift it. The food would move only when the
16:40Germans
16:41felt like it. And a column of trucks parked on one road in enemy territory is not a relief operation.
16:48It is a row of hostages. So Foulkes did something that sounds backwards. He refused the small trust
16:56and demanded a bigger one. He would not settle for what a subordinate offered. He wanted the man who
17:02commanded every German rifle on that line. He demanded to speak to Blazkowicz directly. And Blazkowicz
17:09confirmed it. A ceasefire along the entire Grebe line. German troops would stand down. Food convoys
17:16would have safe passage, starting on May 2nd. From May 4th, three freighters a day would be allowed into
17:24the harbor at Rotterdam. Here is the second layer of our answer, and it changes the first. Foulkes was not
17:32trusting the Germans less than they offered. He was trusting them more. Because a promise made by one
17:40officer about one road can be broken by one officer on one road. A promise made by the commander of
17:49an
17:49entire army along the entire front binds every man in it. If a single German post fired on a single
17:59Canadian truck, it would not be a local incident. It would be Blazkowicz breaking his own word,
18:07in front of the Allied command he would soon have to surrender to.
18:11Zeiss Inkvart would not surrender that day. He left Achterveld the way he came in, through the north
18:19doors. But the shooting along the Grebe line stopped. Still, a promise is only words on paper until somebody
18:28has to stand next to a pile of food and keep it. The real test would not be in a
18:34school room. It would
18:36be on the road between Wageningen and Rehnen, where Canadian trucks would soon be unloading within sight
18:43of German rifles. The next day, May 1st, Foulkes sat down with Blazkowicz's chief of staff, Paul Reichelt,
18:51to turn the promise into rules. That is where the line about German guards was written. And before the
18:58week was out, Foulkes would add something to the deal that told the Germans, very politely, exactly how
19:06far the Canadians trusted them. May 1st, 1945. A spot the Dutch called The Nude, in the strip of
19:15no man's land between Wageningen and Rehnen, Charles Foulkes sat down with Paul Reichelt, and this meeting
19:22was not about Soviet officers or who would be shot. It was about trucks. Which roads? Which hours? Who stands
19:32where? Who fires? And who does not? You heard the terms at the very start of this story. Neutral corridors
19:40in the north and the south. Every soldier inside them to stand fast. No patrols. No firing of any
19:48weapon of any kind. Reichelt guaranteed that German soldiers would not obstruct the deliveries. And then
19:56the clause that sits at the heart of our question. The Germans would provide guards for the food dumps,
20:02to protect them from civilians and from German troops. Listen to that last part again, now that
20:09you have been to Achterwelt. From German troops. Reichelt was admitting, at the table, that his own
20:16soldiers might steal the food. And the Canadian answer was not to send Canadian guards across the line.
20:23It was to make the German army police itself. Think about what that does. Every German sentry standing
20:31over a pile of Canadian tins is now carrying out his own commander's promise. If the food disappears,
20:38it is not the Dutch who failed, and it is not the Canadians. It is Blazkowicz's army, breaking Blazkowicz's
20:45word, under Blazkowicz's own guards. Foulkes tried for more that day. He raised the idea of
20:52surrender. Reichelt would not hear of it. Keep that refusal in mind. And within days, the two men added
21:00something else to the arrangement. The neutral zone was widened. And a joint food distribution
21:06committee was set up, Canadians and Germans together, to deal with any complaint that the operation was
21:13not being carried out properly. A complaints committee. Think about who builds one of those.
21:19You do not need a complaints desk with people you trust. You need it with people you expect to cut
21:24corners. And you want them to know that every missing crate will be written down and brought back to the
21:30table. That was the Canadian kind of trust. Open hands and a ledger. Now go back to the road. May
21:392nd,
21:39early morning. Captain Robert Parkinson's trucks roll out with their white flags. The drivers under orders to
21:47stay in their cabs, weapons out of sight. The first convoy reaches Rhenen. And here is a detail that tells
21:54you everything about that road. At the drop point, it was not only the Canadians who were suspicious.
22:01The Germans wanted to inspect the cargo. So Dutch civilians unloaded the Canadian trucks. The Germans
22:08looked through what had come across. And then the food was loaded again onto trucks driven by Dutch
22:14drivers, heading west toward Utrecht. So the Canadians did not trust the Germans. And the Germans did not
22:22trust the Canadians. And the food went through anyway. Remember that. It is going to matter in a
22:28few days, when the trust has to run the other way. One Canadian driver, Bill Mason, remember to run like
22:37this to a point near the German lines. Fifteen or twenty trucks of army rations. Corned beef, sardines,
22:45tinned fruit. Dutch civilians carrying white flags came out and stacked the food on a small rise beside
22:53the highway, while German soldiers with rifles moved back and forth and watched. Mason said he was a little
23:00nervous. Just that the Germans kept on staring at us. Then an officer blew a whistle and the trucks
23:09turned for home. At Rennen, a British lieutenant named John Abbott from the 49th Division, which served
23:16under Folk's command, led a convoy of fifty trucks and found a problem nobody had planned for. The Dutch who
23:24came to unload were too weak to lift the boxes. People who had been starving all winter could not carry
23:32a
23:32crate of tins. So German soldiers were made to do it. Abbott noted dryly that they were not very pleased
23:40and needed some persuasion. On May 4th, a Dutch newspaper described the convoys rolling into cheering
23:48crowds, each column led by a jeep with a white flag. Along the route, it reported, stood Canadian
23:55military police and German SS posts. On the same road, under the same rules. At the supply dumps,
24:04Dutch police were there as well. By the day after the first run, a fully loaded convoy of thirty trucks
24:11was crossing the line every thirty minutes, and the operation was meeting its target of a thousand tons a
24:17day. So the arrangement held. For the first time, you might think you have the answer. The Germans kept
24:25the promise because the promise was built so they could not break it without breaking themselves.
24:31But not everyone on that side of the line had made a promise. At the front, Abbott's convoy was met
24:37by
24:37Dutch SS men, Dutch men in German uniform, who threw bricks and stones at the trucks. Not one shot was
24:46fired.
24:46The discipline held. But it was a reminder that a promise binds only the men who believe they have
24:53something to gain by keeping it. On May 3rd, with trucks crossing every half hour, Reichelt came back
25:01to meet Volks again, at a house outside Wageningen. He brought a message from Blazkowicz. It had nothing to
25:09do with food. And if Volks answered it wrong, every Canadian truck on that road would be sitting inside
25:16an army that had just decided to fight to the end. May 3rd, 1945. A house on the outskirts of
25:25Wageningen.
25:27Outside, on the road to Rennen, Canadian trucks were crossing the line every half hour.
25:33Inside, Paul Reichelt sat down across from Charles Volks for the second time in three days and delivered
25:41his commander's answer. Blazkowicz would not surrender. The 25th Army would fight on. And if it
25:50came to that, Reichelt said, the Germans would blow the dikes, destroy the country, and fight to the last
25:57man. Stop and take in what that sentence meant on the road outside. Every piece of trust the Canadians
26:05had built since the jeep with the white sheet rested on one German general's decision. The guards standing
26:13over the food dumps at Rennen were soldiers of the army that had just threatened to drown the West.
26:20The Dutch drivers heading for Utrecht were already inside it. Parkinson's men,
26:26in their cabs with their weapons out of sight, were inside it every time they crossed. If Blazkowicz
26:32meant what Reichelt said, the truce was not a truce. It was a pause, and the Germans controlled when it
26:41ended. And it made no sense. That is what should strike you. Hitler's death had been announced on
26:48German radio two days earlier. On this same day, German envoys were arriving at Montgomery's
26:55headquarters on the Lüneburg Heath to talk about surrender. The war in the West was ending by the
27:02hour. Why would a 61-year-old professional soldier who had spent his whole career in uniform choose this
27:10moment to fight to the last man? Reichelt gave the reason. And this is where I need you to go
27:16back to
27:17Achterveld, to the German official who sat through an American general's talk of execution and broke into
27:24a cold sweat at the sight of a Soviet colonel. Blazkowicz was afraid his men would be sent to Russia.
27:32Not shot, not tried, shipped east as slave labor. Think about what that fear meant to a German soldier
27:40in May of 1945. He knew how his own army had treated Russian prisoners. He knew what had been done
27:48in the
27:49east. And he assumed the same would now be done to him. For 120,000 German troops in western Holland,
27:57there was only one direction that looked like survival. West. Into the hands of the Canadians
28:05and the British. Anything that kept that door open was worth protecting. Anything that might close it
28:13was worth fighting over. Now look at the German guards at Ränen again, because this is the third
28:21layer of our answer. They were not guarding the food because they had grown fond of the Dutch.
28:27They were guarding the door. Every crate that arrived safely was proof, to the Canadians, that the 25th
28:36army could be dealt with. That it kept its word. That it was an army you could accept a surrender
28:42from,
28:43rather than one you had to destroy. But the threat on the table was the opposite of that,
28:50and Foulkes had to answer it, there, in that room. He did not bargain over the surrender.
28:56He spread a map on the table and laid out the terms, and they were unconditional. The same terms
29:03Montgomery had drafted. There was nothing soft in them. And when Reichelt spoke of the dikes, Foulkes
29:11pointed him to where that road led. Opening the dikes on a starving country, with the war in its last
29:18days,
29:18was the kind of act men would be tried for. The men who ordered it would not be facing an
29:24army. They
29:26would be facing a court. That was the stick.
29:29Then Foulkes did the thing that makes this story what it is. He gave Reichelt an undertaking. The
29:37men of the 25th army would not be sent to Russia. Not a treaty. Not a signature from Moscow or
29:44Washington or London. The word of a Canadian Corps commander, given across a table in a house outside
29:52Wageningen, to the chief of staff of an army that had just threatened to flood the country.
29:58Do you see what has happened? For a week, the question in this story has been,
30:03why the Canadians trusted the Germans? On May 3rd, the question turned around. Now,
30:11a German army had to decide whether to trust a Canadian. Whether a promise made by Charles Foulkes
30:18was worth laying down 120,000 rifles for. Reichelt took the answer back to Blazkowicz,
30:25and Blazkowicz agreed to surrender. On the road to Rennen, the trucks kept rolling. Most of the men
30:32on that road never knew how close it had come. The guards stayed at their dumps. The food kept moving
30:39west. The next day, May 4th, on the Lundbergheath, German envoys signed the surrender of all German forces
30:48to Northwest Germany, Denmark, and the Netherlands to Montgomery, effective the following morning.
30:53On paper, the 25th Army's war was over. But paper was not what Foulkes was dealing in. He wanted
31:01Blazkowicz himself, in a room, across a table, agreeing to every condition by which 120,000 armed
31:09Germans would now live under Canadian control. He summoned him to a hotel in Wageningen. The hotel
31:17de Verald, for May 5th. Blazkowicz came. And at some point in those talks, he put a question of his
31:26own to the Canadian general. It was about a list, and whether his name was on it. What Foulkes did
31:35with
31:35that question is the moment the whole bargain finally comes into focus. May 5th, 1945. 11 o'clock in the
31:44morning, the Hotel de Verald in Wageningen, a town whose people had been evacuated months before.
31:51Paul Reichelt arrived on time, with an interpreter. Inside, Charles Foulkes was waiting, and with him,
31:59Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands, commander of the Dutch Interior Forces, in a hotel in his own country,
32:05about to receive the German army that had occupied it for five years.
32:11Foulkes looked at the man in front of him and sent him back. Reichelt was not enough. Blazkowicz had to
32:18come himself. That afternoon. Notice that. The war was over on paper. Montgomery had the signatures.
32:28Foulkes could have taken the chief of staff and saved himself an afternoon. He would not.
32:34Everything he had built over the past week had rested on one man's word, and he wanted that man in
32:41the room.
32:42At four in the afternoon, Johannes Blazkowicz arrived. 61 years old, a professional soldier
32:50since before the First World War, and a man with a record you may not expect. In Poland, in 1939
32:58and 40,
32:59as the German military commander there, he had protested against the persecution and murder of
33:06Polish Jews, and had been removed for it. Remember that, because it is about to matter. This was a
33:14general who had seen what his own side had done, said so in writing, and understood what the world was
33:20about to ask of every German general. There were reporters in the hotel, and cameramen.
33:28Foulkes went through the conditions one by one. The document set out how 120,000 German soldiers would
33:35behave in the Netherlands from that day on. When Foulkes asked whether he was willing to capitulate,
33:41one account has Blazkowicz answering with a single word, jawohl. But he also asked for time, 24 hours,
33:51to see whether he could actually meet every demand. An army that had threatened to fight to the last man
33:58two days earlier was now asking whether it could deliver on its promises. Think about that change.
34:05And then came the question. Blazkowicz asked Foulkes whether he was on any allied list of war criminals.
34:12It was not the first time. At Achterveld, one of the German generals had asked the same thing about
34:19him. The question had followed this negotiation from the first table to the last. Underneath the
34:25dikes and the food and the terms, this was what the German command had wanted to know all along.
34:32What happens to us? Now put yourself in Foulkes' chair, because this is the decisive moment of
34:39the whole story. He holds the one thing Blazkowicz wants. He could leave the man guessing. He could
34:46hint. He could use the fear to squeeze one more concession out of him. Every instinct of a negotiator
34:54says, keep the card in your hand. Foulkes did not play it. He checked. He put the question
35:01to supreme headquarters, Eisenhower's headquarters, and waited for a real answer. And when it came,
35:08he gave it to Blazkowicz straight. He was not on the list. That is the moment the whole bargain
35:15comes into focus. So let me lay it out plainly, the way it now looks with everything you know.
35:22The Canadians never trusted German goodwill. They trusted German fear, and they built a road for it
35:29to travel on. What the Germans in Western Holland wanted above everything was simple. To surrender
35:36west, not east, and to go home. The food truce was the first piece of that road. A German sentry
35:44who
35:45guarded a pile of Canadian tins was proving his army could be taken at its word, so that his army
35:51could
35:51be taken prisoner by the right people. The guards kept the food safe because the food was their ticket.
35:58But a ticket is worth nothing unless someone honors it. And this is the Canadian part of it. The road
36:05only worked because the man at the other end of it kept his word. Foulkes promised the 25th army would
36:12not be sent to Russia. He answered Blazkowicz's question with the truth, when a lie or a silence
36:19would have been more useful. The Germans guarded the food on the strength of a Canadian promise.
36:25And the Canadian promise was good. That is why the Canadians could trust German guards with Holland's
36:32food. Not because the Germans were trustworthy. Because the Canadians had made sure that for once,
36:40keeping a promise was the only sensible thing a German soldier could do. And because their own word
36:47made that true. After the surrender, the road changed. Canadian trucks could now drive into the
36:55formerly occupied west without German interference. And the Germans helped run the very operation they
37:02had been guarding. It had a code name by the way. Faust. The man in the old story who makes
37:09a bargain with the
37:10devil. It is said the name was chosen for exactly that reason. By May 10th, the last thousand ton
37:18allotment had been delivered. But a surrender signed in a hotel is one thing. The streets are another.
37:26Two days after Blazkowicz walked out of the Hotel de Wereld in Amsterdam, where the Canadians had not yet
37:32arrived. German soldiers opened fire on a crowd of Dutch civilians celebrating their freedom. It was the
37:40first real test of what this trust was worth in a place where no Canadian was watching. And what the
37:47Canadians did next is the last move in this story. May 7th, 1945. The Dam, the great square in the
37:55heart of
37:56Amsterdam. The city had heard the war was over. It had not yet seen a single Canadian. So crowds filled
38:04the
38:05square to wait for them. People who had survived the hunger winter waiting to see their liberators arrive.
38:12From a building on the edge of the square, German navy men opened fire into the crowd. Nineteen people were
38:20killed. More than a hundred were wounded. Two days after Blazkowicz had agreed to capitulate in Wageningen.
38:28I am not going to pretend this fits neatly into the story. It does not. It is the limit of
38:35everything you
38:36have seen so far. Think back to the road to Renan. The trust worked there because two things were true.
38:45The men holding the rifles answered to a commander who had made a promise face to face. And Canadians
38:54were close by, on the same road, watching. On the dam, the second was missing. No Canadian had arrived.
39:03And without that, the men in that building acted as though a surrender signed by a general far away
39:10had nothing to do with them. You saw a hint of it on the road to Renan, with the Dutch
39:15SS men and their
39:16bricks. A promise binds only the men who believe they have something to gain by keeping it. On the dam,
39:24some men with rifles behaved as if they had nothing left to gain and nothing left to lose.
39:30So the question for the Canadians was simple and urgent. Do you keep trusting German officers to
39:37control German soldiers? Or do you throw the method away? They did neither. They kept the method and
39:45closed the gap. Canadian troops moved into the western cities as fast as the roads allowed. In
39:53Amsterdam, the Seaforth Highlanders' padre, Roy Dernford, wrote of the welcome,
39:59Flowers, roses, tulips, and every sort. Then came the work. Feed the Dutch, collect the Germans,
40:08disarm them, control them. The German soldiers were marched into empty factories and other large
40:15buildings. And here is the part that should sound familiar. Their own senior officers were left in
40:22command of them. The same principle as the guards at Renan. Germans policing Germans. Only now,
40:31without their weapons, and with Canadians at the door. It usually worked. Not always. But usually.
40:39And the Canadians kept the ledger they had started with the complaints committee.
40:43When Dutch newspapers accused them of shipping supplies off to Germany, General Harry Crerar,
40:50commanding 1st Canadian Army, put a number on it. The Germans had been allowed only 450 tons
40:58for their immediate needs. Meanwhile, the convoys ran almost without stopping. By June 22nd, the
41:07Canadians reported 242,000 tons of food, coal, fuel, and stores brought in. Within a few weeks,
41:17the Dutch had most of what they needed to eat. Butter was still hard to find. And then came the
41:24last
41:24part of the bargain. The part the Germans had been waiting for since Reichelt first spoke the word
41:30Russia. On May 25th, the official departure began. The Germans marched out of the Netherlands by road,
41:38in formations of around 10,000 men at a time. East. Home. To Germany.
41:47Now watch what the Canadians did, one last time. They searched them. And what came out of those columns
41:54tells you exactly why the Canadians had never trusted blindly. Fur coats. Cars. Radios. Horses.
42:03Money. More than 15 million in Dutch currency, some of it hidden in ambulances, some carried by German
42:11women auxiliaries. All of it was handed back to the Dutch. So the ledger was there to the very end.
42:18But so was the promise. And here is the detail that, for me, closes the circle.
42:25Canadian troops went along on those marches, not only to guard the Germans, to guard them from the
42:31Dutch. General Bert Hoffmeister, who commanded the 5th Canadian Armored Division, put it bluntly.
42:38Without the Canadians, he said, the Dutch people would have wounded a lot of them and maybe killed a few.
42:45Hold that image against the one we started with. On May 2nd, Canadian drivers rolled past armed
42:54Germans with weapons hidden in their cabs, not knowing if the men at the roadside would keep their
43:00word. A few weeks later, Canadian soldiers walked beside unarmed Germans on the roads east, making sure
43:09the Dutch did not take their revenge. The rifles had changed hands. The trust had not changed shape.
43:18It had always been an exchange. Germans guarded Canadian food. Canadians guarded German lives.
43:26Within three weeks, the entire German force was home. Not in Russia. Not in a labor camp in the east.
43:35Home. The undertaking Charles Foulkes gave across a table outside Wageningen on the worst day of the
43:42whole negotiation had been kept to the letter. That is the last move in this story. And it is a
43:50Canadian one. Not a battle. A promise kept. To an enemy, when nobody could have made the Canadians keep it.
44:00Within months, Foulkes would be at the top of the Canadian army. Blazkowicz's road would end somewhere
44:07very different. And eight years after the surrender, Foulkes did one last thing with the paper Blazkowicz had
44:15agreed to in Wageningen. What he did with it tells you how the Canadians themselves understood what had
44:21happened in that hotel. May 2nd, 1945. The road back from Rennen. Robert Parkinson's trucks came back
44:30across the line empty, white flags still flying. Behind them, in that strip of no man's land,
44:37the cargo they had carried was already moving west toward Utrecht, past German sentries who had promised
44:44to let it through. Parkinson said later that they had no contact with the Germans at all. They handed
44:51the food to the Dutch and they drove home. He put the meaning of it in one sentence. We knew
44:58we were
44:58taking food to the Dutch people. In January of 1984, nearly 40 years later, Parkinson set down his army
45:08recollections. The archive that holds them sums up that morning in a single line. A somewhat nervous
45:15journey through the German lines in trucks flying the white flag. Somewhat nervous. That is a very
45:24Canadian way to describe driving into an enemy army behind a white flag with a weapon out of sight.
45:31Farley Mowit, the young officer who drove into the German lines behind a bed sheet,
45:36went home and became one of the most widely read writers Canada ever produced. Decades later,
45:44when he was appointed to the Order of Canada, the record of his life still mentioned that drive,
45:51through enemy lines, to open unofficial talks about food. Charles Foulkes went on to the very top. On
46:02he was named Chief of the General Staff, ahead of Guy Simons, who was senior to him. He became the
46:09first
46:09chairman of Canada's Chiefs of Staff Committee and the first Canadian to chair NATO's Military Committee.
46:17In 1960, he resigned, in protest over defence policy. He died in Ottawa in 1969. But I promised you one
46:28more
46:29thing he did. In 1953, Foulkes gave the original Wageningen surrender document to the town of Wageningen,
46:38not to a museum in Ottawa, to the Dutch town where it was signed. It is still there in the
46:45municipal
46:45archives. Nearly 70 years later, Dutch archivists nominated it as their document of the year.
46:53Think about what that gesture says. The paper that ended the German occupation of Western Holland was,
47:00in the end, a Canadian paper. Foulkes drew it up. Foulkes went through it line by line. Foulkes held the
47:08general across the table to it. And when the time came to decide where it belonged, he decided it belonged
47:15to the people it had been written for. Johannes Blazkowicz never went home. He was held for trial at
47:22Nuremberg, among the German generals charged after the war. On February 5th, 1948, the day his trial was
47:31to begin, he died in a fall inside the prison. He was 64. The answer Foulkes gave him in Wageningen
47:38had been true on the day it was given. The courts came later. But this is not his story. Come
47:45back to
47:46the Dutch, and to the Canadians, because that is where it ends. Somewhere around 20,000 Dutch civilians
47:53had died of hunger by the time the convoys came. Nobody can say how many more would have died if
48:00the
48:00trucks had waited for the war to end on its own, or if the Canadians had fought their way west
48:06through
48:06the dikes. What we know is that on the morning of May 2nd, the food began to move, and it
48:14did not stop.
48:15Today, the Netherlands marks its Liberation Day on May 5th, the date of the Hotel de Wereld. Wageningen
48:24calls itself the City of Liberation. And in the autumn of 1945, Princess Juliana sent a hundred thousand
48:33tulip bulbs to Ottawa as thanks for what Canadian soldiers had done for her country. The tulips
48:40still come. Every spring, Ottawa fills with them. So let me answer the question one last time, as simply
48:49as I can. Why did the Canadians trust German guards with Holland's food? They didn't trust the Germans.
48:57They trusted a bargain they had built themselves, one where keeping the promise was the Germans' only
49:04road home. And they made that road real by keeping their own word, all the way to the last German
49:12column
49:12marching east. White flags on the trucks, weapons hidden in the cabs. Remember how this started?
49:21That was not distrust getting in the way of the bargain. That was the bargain. Open hands and a
49:29ledger. A corps stopped in front of a flooded line, no authority to end the war and no way to
49:36stop the
49:36water. Out of that, a Canadian general and a few hundred Canadian truck drivers fed the starving west
49:44of Holland through an enemy army's own lines, and kept their word to that army when it no longer had
49:51the power to hold them to it. The Dutch noticed. They have been sending tulips ever since. And in the
49:59archives at Wageningen, the paper Charles Foulkes gave back is still there. Thank you for spending this
50:05time with me, and with the story of what the Canadians did on the road to Renan. If you think
50:12what those Canadian soldiers and drivers did deserves to be remembered, a like genuinely helps it find
50:19more people. And if you'd like to hear more, we're here every week. If your father, your grandfather,
50:26or your uncle, served in the Second World War, I'd be honored to hear about him in the comments.