Fifty years after the the start TIME brings a series of extensive articles on World War II. Though the Dutch fought bravely, they were no match for Hitler’s blitzkrieg.

Exiled Thucydides knew

All that a speech can say

About Democracy,

And what dictators do . . .

The habit-forming pain,

Mismanagement and grief:

We must suffer them all again.

– SEPTEMBER 1, 1939, by W.H. AUDEN*

If one man could be singled out as Hitler’s most resolute and effective…

Lieut. Colonel Den Ouden, veteran of service in Indonesia, among the first to volunteer when The Netherlands decided to send a force to Korea, died in a ambush of Chinese communists.

Lieut. Colonel M.P.A. den Ouden, 40, paratrooper and veteran of service in Indonesia, was among the first to volunteer when The Netherlands decided to send a force to Korea. At the head of 600-odd Dutch soldiers, he arrived in the battle theater last November.

Colonel den Ouden and his men…

Last week, for the third time since World War II ended, there was war in Indonesia between The Netherlands troops and native nationalists.

Last week, for the third time since World War II ended, there was war in Indonesia between The Netherlands troops and native nationalists. The Dutch started it. As they had before, they called it “police action”—a necessary step which, they said, they had been “regretfully obliged” to take…

Because of the violations the truce and agreement between The Netherlands Government and Rep. of Indonesia, the Dutch struck, plunging into a war of white men against brown men.

At midnight the Dutch struck. Troops seized the radio, the cable office, and Republican government buildings in Batavia, seat of the Dutch administration in Java. Next day, Dutch planes struck at the Republic’s weak air force (about 40 old Japanese planes), which they caught on the ground. With artillery preparation,…

The skies above Europe were crisscrossed last week by notables. In the Netherlands, just liberated by the surrender of all the occupying German forces, dropped Wilhelmina and Juliana.

Europe and the skies above were crisscrossed last week by notables commuting in & out of history. Into The Netherlands, just liberated by the surrender of all the occupying German forces, dropped Queen Wilhelmina (after five years’ exile in Britain) and Princess Juliana (after five years’ exile in Canada and…

In Arnhem, Canadian infantrymen had to battle for every house. But in the Canadians’ sweep to the North Sea, resistance virtually ended with the fall of Groningen.

In the industrial hedgehog of the Ruhr, the watery flatlands of The Netherlands and the stream-scalloped woods and plains of northwestern Germany, the fighting last week was a sample of what the Allies may expect in many a pocket. It was several kinds of warfare: hard battling against solid centers…

Along the NLs front Canadians had to battle for every yard. Germans blew dikes, set up new lines behind 400 square miles of flooded lowlands.

It was a week of almost incredible military events. In six days the western Allied armies took 189,611 prisoners; in all their battles in World War I the Americans had taken less than one-third of that total. In those six days at least 25,000 Germans had been killed or…

After her five long years of exile Queen Wilhelmina returns to Netherlands. Wilhelmina toured flooded Walcheren Island where royal tears welled up again & again.

Town Crier Toon den Broeke sang out the news: Queen Wilhelmina, their venerable Landsmoeder (“Mother of the Land”) was coming home to Holland. After her five long years of exile, the villagers of little Eede would be the first to welcome her. Even now her Majesty was driving up the…

Allied airmen reported Germans were moving troops eastward in The Netherlands. This might foretell a Nazi evacuation of Amsterdam, Rotterdam, Utrecht, The Hague.

As usual when victory is in the air. Winston Churchill was as jolly and prankish as a boy on a picnic. Touring the conquered Siegfried Line, the Prime Minister gaily flicked ashes on the futile, grey-green, concrete dragon’s teeth which Hitler had set up to keep tanks out of the…

Gerbrandy, Holland’s Premier since 1940, resigned. Queen Wilhelmina whisked him back to form a “broader” government. With food rations political unrest in Holland began in the stomach.

In London The Netherlands Government in Exile also underwent a political crisis. Pieter S. Gerbrandy, Holland’s Premier since 1940, resigned. Promptly Queen Wilhelmina whisked him back to form a “broader” government.

As in Belgium, the Resistance and hunger were behind the crisis. In Maastricht, liberated Holland’s biggest city, underground fighters…

In the NL., German forces crossed the Maas River at two points, established one bridgehead north of Venlo (later wiped out by British counterattack), another near Geertruidenberg.

French civilians streamed out of Strasbourg, back into the Vosges Mountains. There was talk of evacuating the city. The Germans might be coming back.

For ten days Allied reconnaissance planes had been reporting troop move ments in the Palatinate (southwestern corner of the German Rhineland), so the attack could not…

A Dutch Resistance leader fooled the Gestapo by teaching his child his first two Dutch words: “Pappie dood!” (Daddy dead!).

Children who may babble innocently to the police have always been a danger to underground workers. Last week a story from the liberated Netherlands told how one Dutch Resistance leader solved the problem. With a Gestapo price on his head, the man used to slip home now & again to…

The Allies learned about the German V2 rockets. Hollanders on liberated Walcheren island told of the German’s careful guarding of V-2 launchings.

How much the Allies had managed to learn about the ingenious German enemy’s devilish V-2 rocket bomb was a security secret last week. But it was no secret that they believed they knew one source of its superspeedy power: its fuel. They did something about it.

In sleet-streaked weather a…

There is no meat and scarcely any bread in the liberated industrialized regions of the Netherlands. Hordes of refugees had swarmed into the cities, further complicating the food crisis.

In Belgium last week the crisis came to a head. Ever since his return from exile, Belgium’s Communists have attacked Premier Hubert Pierlot. They have criticized his Government’s courageous but unpopular deflation program (TIME, Nov. 6), its slowness in purging collaborators, its handling of food rationing and crippled communications. When…

The only full-scale fighting was in The Netherlands, where the Germans were in orderly retreat northward across the Maas. A new attack against Arnhem was mounted.

While the Allied armies on the western front waited for Antwerp to open up, there could be no general push. So, while U.S. troops, from Belgium south, scrapped fiercely in local actions and conserved their ammunition, the only full-scale fighting was in The Netherlands, where the Germans were in orderly…