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…

Walter Maass writes about Dutch resistance, humor and trains in his book The Netherlands At War: 1940-1945. Maass’s book is orderly and stolid as the people he writes about.

THE NETHERLANDS AT WAR: 1940-1 945 by Walter B. Maass. 264 pages. Abe-lard-Schuman. $6.95.

For most Americans, the story of The Netherlands during the second World War is the story of a life in the attic: The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank. What this concise new history…