Posted on 05/03/2015 5:44:17 AM PDT by Homer_J_Simpson
Hmmm. Wouldn’t mind checking out the chicken ‘n noodles at Howies. Reasonable price!
It's not like Ireland found itself in the same sort of pickle Finland was in early in the war.
By ancestry I'm 1/4 Irish (Early/Kane/McDonald/Mead/Sheehan), and I was aware of Ireland's official neutrality during WW2, but lazily I've never bothered to learn the reason(s) for it. Ultimately, was it simply "the enemy of my enemy is my friend"?
Because of the water obstacles, which the Germans augmented with deliberate flooding, Holland was easily defended with a minimum of troops.It was also a strategic dead-end. An attack into Holland would have required a commitment of resources out of proportion to any military benefit, and would not have served the purpose of directing military operations at the heart of Germany and the destruction of her armed forces.
Those were Ike’s orders and he was remarkably consistent in pursuing them.
I suppose all that was a factor in Holland abandoning their traditional neutrality and enthusiastically joined NATO after the war.
I read the Leo Marks book Between Silk and Cyanide and he was pretty worked up about it all those years later. He was in the Special Operations Executive and figured out the Dutch operation was compromised but couldn't get his superior to do anything about it. Seems to have been a combination of vanity, bureaucratic rivalry and refusal to admit a mistake.
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