8

President “Dutch” Roosevelt’s Promise

How Eisenhower would receive Prince Bernhard’s approach would be dictated by two things—Eisenhower’s own attitude to the problem of the starving Dutch and his instructions from Washington in the matter. Those instructions would be framed by a promise that President Franklin Roosevelt had made to Queen Wilhelmina.

Six months earlier, on Friday, October 13, 1944, President Roosevelt had received the Dutch minister for overseas territories, Dr. H. J. van Mook, at the White House. It did not prove an unlucky Friday the thirteenth for Van Mook, or for the Dutch people as a whole, although the fruits of this meeting would take time to materialize. With the failure of Operation Market Garden, the continuing railroad strike in Holland and the German crackdown on the distribution of food to the civilian population in the west of the Netherlands, Van Mook had come to the White House bearing a message from Queen Wilhelmina begging the president’s aid for her people.

The queen had briefed Van Mook to expect a warm welcome from America’s leader. Queen and president were of a similar age; Wilhelmina was just two years older than Roosevelt. Even though they had only met a few times—during a 1943 visit to the United States by Wilhelmina—they had corresponded regularly through the 1930s and 1940s with great mutual respect and affection. Wilhelmina also believed that she had an ace up her sleeve—Roosevelt’s Dutch blood. The last time she had seen Roosevelt—in the summer of 1943, when he had personally driven her to the railroad station at Hyde Park in New York State after she had visited the Roosevelts at the president’s family home there—FDR had told Wilhelmina that the Netherlands held a special place in his heart. She had good reasons to believe him.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt was indeed proud of his Dutch heritage, which stretched back to his paternal great-great-great grandfather Claes Maartenszen Rosenfelt, a Dutch immigrant from Tholen Island at the mouth of the Rhine. Sometime between 1638 and 1649 he landed in Nieuw Amsterdam, today’s New York City, then capital of the Dutch colony in North America. Over several hundred years, and initially via the poor literacy of family members and of clerks filling out official records, the family name changed as many as fourteen times, first to Van Rosevelt, and finally to Roosevelt.1

When Franklin Roosevelt was a nineteen-year-old student at Harvard University, he wrote a sixty-page paper, “The Roosevelt Family in New Amsterdam before the Revolution,” for his American History course, doing extensive genealogical research on his family background. His interest in his Dutch roots aroused, he would become active in numerous Dutch organizations in the United States including the Holland Society and the St. Nicholas Society of the City of New York. An amateur architect, he developed a passion for the Dutch Colonial style of architecture. In 1926, while planning the redevelopment of the Warm Springs health spa resort in Georgia where he had received treatment for polio, which took away the use of his legs, he instructed the architect to include as many Dutch design features as possible.

When the architect came back with preliminary designs for the Warm Springs project, Roosevelt declared that the window arches were not Dutch. The architect countered that they were of Pennsylvania Dutch design, which generated a laugh from FDR—he knew what the architect apparently did not, that the so-called Pennsylvania Dutch design was in fact German in origin. When the Roosevelt Warm Springs Institute for Rehabilitation opened in 1927—it continues to operate to this day—its cottages were indeed of Dutch Colonial design. The Little White House that Roosevelt built at Warm Springs as a presidential retreat five years later was, however, of a more generally colonial design.

The lack of knowledge in the architectural profession about Dutch Colonial design inspired Roosevelt to commission author Helen W. Reynolds to put together an authoritative book on the subject. FDR wrote, tongue in cheek, to Reynolds on June 10, 1926: “It is just a tiny bit amusing to think of your name and mine going before the public as experts on old Dutch houses. Think of the demand for future architectural works that will be made on us.”2 The book, Dutch Houses in the Hudson Valley before 1776, would be published in 1929. It was in fact Roosevelt’s ambition to revive the Dutch Colonial style in America, and in 1937, when he personally drew the first architectural sketches for the Roosevelt Library at Springwood Estate, his Hyde Park, New York family home, his design had many Dutch Colonial influences that were incorporated into the final structure. In 1937, too, Roosevelt personally designed Top Cottage, a retreat he had built at Springwood Estate, in the Dutch Colonial style.

In 1940, because of his strong affection for Queen Wilhelmina, even though he had not met her by that stage, and as a German invasion of Holland seemed imminent, Roosevelt had urged her to relocate the royal family to the United States. After Wilhelmina chose to remain in England, and Princess Juliana took her daughters and herself to Canada, Roosevelt had invited the princess to visit Mrs. Roosevelt and himself in the United States. Juliana took him up on this offer each summer over the next several years.

In 1943, Juliana rented a house at Hyde Park for three months, to be close to the Roosevelts when they stayed at Springwood Estate over the summer. This proved an idyllic period for all concerned. Roosevelt adored the young princesses, Beatrix, or “Trixie” as she was known in the family, and Irene. One of very few photographs of Roosevelt sitting in the wheelchair that he usually occupied shows him with young Trixie. He was especially fond of the latest member of the Dutch royal family, a third daughter, Margriet, born to Juliana and Bernhard that year, and agreed to be her godfather. FDR wrote to Prince Bernhard in England that summer, telling him that every morning at Hyde Park, baby Margriet was brought to him as he breakfasted, and she played contentedly with a spoon while he ate.

If any further evidence of Roosevelt’s love of Holland and the Dutch was needed, Wilhelmina had been told by Juliana that, in May 1944, Roosevelt had written to her in Canada offering her the use of his two adjoining summer houses on Campobello Island in New Brunswick, Canada, which he and Eleanor would not be using that year. In the letter, Roosevelt described the summer houses to Juliana, adding, “They are yours to occupy, and, because we are both Dutch, the terms would be extremely simple—no rent.”3

Five months after Roosevelt penned that letter, and just days after Wilhelmina’s sixty-sixth birthday, Minister Van Mook came to the president on behalf of Wilhelmina and her Dutch government-in-exile to beg the president to put his support where his heart was. Roosevelt had given Van Mook forty minutes to put his case, and he listened intently. As the pair parted, the president assured the Dutch envoy that he would do what he could to help Holland. When, by January 14, 1945, no help for the starving Dutch had materialized, Queen Wilhelmina wrote a near-desperate letter to both the British king, George VI, and President Roosevelt. She wrote that, if immediate military aid to Holland was not possible, “then immediate aid in the shape of massive evacuation or in the shape of food supplies, clothing, fuel and medicine is necessary.”4 There was no formal reply from Roosevelt.

That March, Princess Juliana came down from Canada and paid her annual visit to the Roosevelts. She would write to her mother the queen that she was shocked by what she saw when she met the president again. The previous year, Roosevelt had been diagnosed with serious heart disease, although he and his doctor kept this from all but the members of his inner circle. The Franklin Roosevelt that Juliana now saw, for the last time as it turned out, was thin, pale and weak. He was clearly a dying man. But still Juliana pursued the case for relief for the Dutch.

On March 21, Roosevelt finally dictated a reply to Queen Wilhelmina’s January letter. “You can be very certain that I shall not forget the country of my origin,” he said before going on to inform her that he had instructed General Eisenhower to “channel as much food as possible to Amsterdam.”5

Planning to deliver a major speech at the upcoming United Nations Conference on International Organization in San Francisco, on March 29 the ailing Roosevelt arrived at the Little White House at Warm Springs in Georgia for a rest. Two weeks later, on the afternoon of April 12, still at Warm Springs and while sitting for a portrait painter in the Little White House, Roosevelt suffered a massive stroke. He was dead within minutes.

But what of the supposed presidential directive to Eisenhower to channel as much food as possible to Holland? That Eisenhower had the power to alleviate the plight of the Dutch was not in doubt. Nazi Germany’s Lieutenant General Bodo Zimmermann, commander of the Wehrmacht’s Army Group D, was to later lament, “Eisenhower, the servant of the great democracies, was given full powers of command over an armed force consisting of all three services [land, sea and air]. With us, living under a dictatorship where unity of command might have been taken for granted, each of the services fought its own battles.”6 Eisenhower could order the Allied armies, air forces and navies to go to the aid of the Dutch in a coordinated operation, and he would be obeyed. What was more, at SHAEF, Eisenhower had the men and the skills to organize such a major mercy mission.

Wilhelmina, in London, grieving the loss of a president and a friend, had received Roosevelt’s March 21 letter, but neither she nor Prince Bernhard had received any indication since then that the Allies were making preparations to send massive food aid to occupied Holland. What Queen Wilhelmina didn’t know was that on April 10, Winston Churchill had also acted, quite independently, in response to her January letter, which King George had passed on to him. Two days before Roosevelt died, Churchill had cabled the president about occupied Holland: “I fear we may soon be in the presence of a tragedy.” He proposed a diplomatic initiative, suggesting that Britain and the United States could make approaches to the Germans via Switzerland, urging them to allow aid to be sent to the Dutch from Sweden. He also thought that the Germans in Holland might be prepared to accept aid for Dutch civilians from areas controlled by the Allies. “We must avert this tragedy if we can,” Churchill said. “But if we cannot, we must at least make it clear to the world on whose shoulders the responsibility lies.”7

Roosevelt, in seeming contradiction of his March 21 assurance to Queen Wilhelmina that he had already instructed Eisenhower to arrange for the Dutch in western Holland to receive food to relieve their desperate situation, cabled back in one of his last communications to the British prime minster that he proposed to give the German government notice that it was responsible for feeding the civilian population in those parts of Holland it continued to control.

On the evening of April 14, as Prince Bernhard flew himself to Reims from Breda, which had been liberated the previous October, he had to wonder whether an order had truly been sent from FDR to Eisenhower to feed the Dutch, as the late president had assured Queen Wilhelmina in his last letter. And if it had been sent, would Eisenhower act on that order now that a new president, Harry S. Truman, occupied the White House? He was soon to find out.

At Reims, capital of France’s Champagne district, ninety miles northeast of Paris, a jeep drew to a halt at the curb on a street that would be renamed Rue Franklin Roosevelt. Prince Bernhard, wearing his Dutch army uniform and beret, stepped from the jeep outside the unimpressive building that housed one of the most important military command centers in the world—SHAEF, Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force. It was from here, a three-story, red-brick former technical college fronting the street, that General Eisenhower had run the war in Europe for the Allies since February, after previously being based at Versailles, and, prior to D-Day, in England. Receiving salutes from the pair of American military police at the front door and returning them, the tall, bespectacled prince strode into the building. Having been given only short notice that the Dutch prince was on his way to him, the Supreme Allied Commander Europe nonetheless saw Bernhard at once, and alone.

Eisenhower, or “Ike” as he had been known to those close to him since childhood, was a five-star general, the equivalent of a field marshal in European armies, and a career soldier. Yet he had never been in combat in his life. A West Point graduate in 1915 along with a class from which fifty-nine members, including Omar Bradley, would rise to become generals, Eisenhower trained during World War One as a tank officer. But a week before his unit was due to ship out to Europe to join the conflict in 1918, the Armistice had been signed, bringing the war to an end. Through the 1920s and 1930s, Eisenhower had spent sixteen years as a major, serving as an aide to General Douglas MacArthur before falling out with him, and holding down increasingly responsible desk jobs.

Men such as Britain’s Field Marshal Montgomery, who had fought in the World War One trenches, were privately disdainful of Eisenhower for his lack of combat experience. But it had been Eisenhower’s other talents that had won him promotion and, in 1942, the post of the most powerful Allied commander in the European theater, based in London. Eisenhower was an exceptional organizer and a fine judge of character. He was also a master diplomat. He had to be when dealing with the sometimes incompetent and frequently opinionated generals and political leaders of the member nations of the Allied coalition, from Free French leader General Charles de Gaulle to Winston Churchill. To many at SHAEF and at Field Marshal Montgomery’s headquarters, Prince Bernhard of Holland, a general with no military experience of note, fit that category of the incompetent and the opinionated. But ever the diplomat, Eisenhower treated Bernhard with characteristic courtesy and patience.

Fifty-five years old, trim, with assessing eyes and a quiet delivery, Eisenhower gave Bernhard half an hour of his time. He sat and listened to what the prince had to say about the offer from the Nazi governor of Holland as if he had all the time in the world. Born in Texas and raised in Kansas, Eisenhower had a Pennsylvania Dutch background. But, as President Roosevelt had pointed out to his architect in 1926, the Pennsylvania Dutch were in fact German. Eisenhower’s ancestors were German, having migrated to North America from southwest Germany in the eighteenth century.

When Bernhard detailed the proposals that Dr. Neher had brought from Seyss-Inquart at The Hague, the Supreme Commander was nonplussed. “It is a question for the governments,” Ike declared, indicating that, as far as he was concerned, there was no role for the Allied military here.

This suggested to Bernhard that Eisenhower had not received any instructions from the late President Roosevelt to feed the Dutch in occupied Holland, contrary to what he and the queen had been led to believe. Diplomatically, in light of Roosevelt’s recent passing, Bernhard chose not to ask Eisenhower if he had received such an order, in case the answer put the president in a poor light.

“But I think it is a good proposal,” Eisenhower added.8

Disappointed, the prince flew back to Breda.

Early on Sunday, April 15, Dr. Neher flew to London, where he informed Gerbrandy of what Eisenhower had said to the prince. Gerbrandy put in a call to Winston Churchill, who, not feeling well, had gone to his country house, Chequers in Buckinghamshire, for the weekend. Churchill was nonetheless entertaining a few guests, including the prime minister of South Africa, Jan Smuts, and he invited the Dutch prime minister out to Chequers as well. Gerbrandy wasted no time in driving there. But when he relayed to Churchill the detail of Seyss-Inquart’s proposals, a grumpy Churchill was cool to the idea of dealing with the Nazis.

“We have them in our grasp,” he growled. His preference was to liberate Holland militarily, with an unconditional surrender by the Germans in the country.9

But Gerbrandy, supported by South Africa’s Smuts, pointed out that tens of thousands of Dutch civilians could starve to death before any military solution could be imposed on the Germans in Holland. And there was the threat of total inundation of the country should the Germans choose to destroy the North Sea dikes in the face of further Allied advances.

This made Churchill a little more responsive. He told Gerbrandy that he would take up Seyss-Inquart’s initiative with the Americans. As the dejected Dutch prime minister was leaving, Churchill shook him by the hand warmly and said of the idea of dealing with Seyss-Inquart: “Please don’t believe that I’m rejecting it completely.”10

After driving back to London, Gerbrandy met with the members of his cabinet, the Dutch Council of Ministers. The two men who had brought the proposals from Seyss-Inquart, Dr. Neher and Jacob van der Gaag, were also invited to the meeting, but they found themselves treated with suspicion by many of the Dutch government’s ministers, one of whom wondered in front of them if the pair had not been infected by the Nazis. Gerbrandy spoke up for them, declaring them honest men who had risked their necks to come to London on an important mission.

The ministers also learned that the pair had Queen Wilhelmina’s support. As soon as she’d been informed of their mission, she and Princess Juliana had hurried back to London from Stubbings House and extended an invitation for Dr. Neher to meet with her. This Neher did, at Chester Square, on the morning of the next day, Monday, April 16. The queen, impressed with Neher and excited by the possibilities of Seyss-Inquart’s proposals, invited the doctor and the Resistance leader Jacob van der Gaag to stay with her. That morning, too, the queen telephoned Winston Churchill at 10 Downing Street and urged him to give the Seyss-Inquart proposals serious thought. There was a noncommittal response from Britain’s prime minister.

There, as far as the Dutch were concerned, the whole business seemed to stall.