Years of war 1940-1945 as I experienced them at Wencop
At the outbreak of the war on May 10, 1940, I was only 11 years old and as we lived in Barneveld, we were supposed to evacuate to Nunspeet. But on the morning of May 10, uncle Jan van de Bor came over very early and he offered us a stay at their farm on the Wencopperweg. Later during that year we moved to the farm across the road. My father’s health was not good and he has already passed away in 1953. The three sons were raised to be farmers and I, as the eldest son, was bound to that destiny till about 1948. Already during the war I had been particularly interested in technical matters, such as aeroplanes, rockets, and battles, and these things I therefore recall best.
In the month of May 1940 the village Barneveld was evacuated and the cattle of the farmers had been carried out of the danger zone to farmers in the area. Also at Van de Bor the grassland was filling up with loud mooing cows that needed to be milked. The farm had several hands to help with the milking but it was quite an organization and where to go with all that milk?
During the bombing by the Dutch artillery in Amersfoort of the Germans in the village Barneveld, we were able to hear every hit. On Easter Monday when the German soldiers got nervous as the situation heated, they retreated to the Schaffelaarsebos and the hits came even nearer to us. We were even able to see the dark cloud of smoke above Rotterdam short before the capitulation and this is not something we are likely to forget. Nor shall we forget the red glow above Putten on the Tuesday night after the attack organized by the resistance near the Oldenallerbrug on German officers, halfway Putten and Nijkerk, in the night of Saturday September 30 on Sunday October 1st, 1944. This glow of fire was the result of the burning of over 100 houses of innocent citizens in Putten, which had been set to fire almost simultaneously by the Germans as a reprisal for the attack on that previous Saturday, just as the deportation of 660 men from Putten had been.
The first couple of years
The first two years at war were reasonably quiet for us but I remember that already early in the war my father and the neighbors were obliged to alternately keep watch during the night along a part of the railway track Amersfoort-Apeldoorn, to guard it from sabotage by the growing resistance. Sometimes after school we would follow the in Kootwijkerbroek quartered German military who sang so beautifully in their march. Later the crew of the lookout station of the aireal reconnaissance, made up of older soldiers of the Wehrmacht who had a family at home, had been very kind people.
The bakery of Koot and the car workshop Van den Broek on the Meuleneind, damaged heavily in May 1950.
In 1942 we took in two Jewish boys of about 10 and 18 years old, Jopie and Karel, and also a young girl of about 10 years old, who all stayed at the farm. Karel owned a false passport and occasionally took the train to Amsterdam. The girl had long pitch-black hair and because she stood out she had to stay in the attic at night, although she didn’t want to and often refused. The boys didn’t stand out that much. But when at some point someone from Barneveld asked me if the children were Jewish, and I told my mother about it, the children had to leave. Later another boy was taken in, Wim Kleiman from Rotterdam, during the famine. Also a little later a farmer’s boy, Davis Potappel from Stavenisse on Tholen, came as an evacuee. After Arnhem and Oosterbeek had been evacuated we were allocated another three evacuees and one young child all from Arnhem, and at the end of the war Mr. and Mrs. Van Mourik who lived at the outset of the Wencopperweg, came to stay with us at the farm taking one bedroom. Because of the more frequent attacks at the trains it had become too dangerous at Van Mourik’s house, and actually it was for us children quite pleasant with so many people around. But for my mother it was a time of hard work and sorrow, with seven children and all the other people in the house and others asking at the door for food.
One day when the war had just started, I was waiting at the railway track Hollandse Spoor at the closed level crossing barriers. I don’t remember seeing a train but I do recall the fighter plane with double hull (a Fokker maybe?) that came flying over very low and that had appeared from behind the station and right in front of me fired at the train in the curve close to the Wencopperweg. This was the first attack at the trains that I had seen and many followed.
After September 17, 1944
Gliders carrying military and supplies were pulled by planes to the landing sites.
However for us the war really began with the droppings of the allies between Ede and Arnhem on September 17, 1944. Furthermore the day of our liberation, April 16, 1945 had been truly thrilling. In the period between those two dates we had almost at a daily basis seen or experienced something impressive. On me the attacks at the trains and the airfights made the biggest impression. On September 17 we had seen the gliders that had been pulled by airplanes to the heathland Ginkelse Hei and that landed there. At Wencop we couldn’t see the parachutists. The gliders had carried the military and the supplies of ammunition and so on for the battle for the bridge at Arnhem. For days after that we had heard the shooting from both sides. What had impressed me most on that day September 17 were the huge swarms of English fighters I saw in the sky, who were there to protect the droppings and landings of the English military near Ede from the possible attacks by the Germans in the neighborhood or elsewhere on the Veluwe. In order to stop all traffic the fighters had shot at everything that moved. Even at civilians who had formed small groups of spectators watching the sky. We watched an English fighter dive down near De Grote Brand, and then it fired. It turned out that it has been shooting a small group of young men who were watching the spectacle in the sky. Henk van Ee was among these boys and he wrote the following in his story of the event:
“On Sunday September 17, 1944 the battle for Arnhem started, something that has been documented at length. We hadn’t known what these planes with gliders at the back (about 2000) meant. They landed at the Ginkelse Hei near Ede. This is not that far from our home. We were on the side of the road with about ten people, so that we were able to see well. Tens of fighter planes had been circling the surroundings. Then suddenly one of these came flying low over the road. They didn’t want people to cluster. We hadn’t realized this but we soon found out. Flying in a large elegant loop the plane had gone up and then dived down, shooting straight at us. One of us fled here, the other there. Nobody got hurt, but presumably that hadn’t been intended. Nobody knew where the bullets had hit but we found about 40 cartridges at about 40 meters from the road. It had been rather terrifying.”
The winter of starvation that followed was particularly bad for the people living in the cities. They had to struggle to get additional food and the men had to be alert to evade the raids that were set up randomly in the streets.
This made an older brother of Wim Kleiman one day in that winter of 1944-1945 cycle all the way from Rotterdam on a bicycle without tires to ask for food at our house. During these days also others, up to tens of people per day, came to us for food. On the main roads, like the Rijksweg in Voorthuizen, the number of people asking for food sometimes ran into hundreds. Of these people several asked if they could spend the night, preferably in the hay above the cows, where it was reasonably warm. But even from the village Barneveld we had regular visitors who came a couple of times a week for a few liters of milk and so on. For all these people it became more and more dangerous to be on the streets, but the same was true for us. And not only because of air attacks.
One night when we took horse and wagon to go over to the Van Mourik house to fetch some things while it was dark, we were heading back home on the Wencopperweg, near the point where nowadays is the connection to the new road from Harselaar-Oost, when we were fired at by the German defence artillery at the back of a train. This must have been the most dangerous moment for us during the entire war. Streams of flares brushed past our heads and the horse was about to bolt but David Potappel was able to keep it restraint while hiding behind a tree. I myself was hiding behind another tree. We hadn’t known then that these bullets can easily pass through a tree, but we all survived. When we arrived at the junction at Bakker’s, we met some boys who had crossed the level crossing just in front of that train. So they had been the cause of the shooting and indeed they also had been fired at, but the train had moved on and also they had gotten away unharmed.
The slaughterhouse Deptford at the junction of the Baron van Nagellstraat and the Parallelweg north of the railway tracks has been hit several times.
The by now deserted houses of Hammer (left) and Smit at the waste disposal site of Vink (Picture: Gert Jan van Elten).
Shooting
In these years in which the frequency and intensity of the shootings at the trains by the English fighters increased, we realized that our farm was at a safe distance from the railway and in relation to the sun also on the better side of the tracks. The fighters often arrived at about 10 o’clock in the morning on sunny days. We would look up to the sky expecting them. Usually there would be four of them but occasionally six or eight fighters with machine guns and missiles on board. Whenever they noticed a train close to the Hollandse Spoor level crossing, they would dive out of the sunlight right above us and tailed after each other towards that train. They first fired the artillery at the last carriage and after that the locomotive. If there were four of them, they had to be fast and they would make a short turn so that no.1 tailed to no. 4. Flying with six or eight fighters they would need some more space and the circle was enlarged. Bertus Hooijer who lived at the farm Bekelaar told me that because of the fighters they would plow and work on the land close to the tracks very early in the morning. At the end of the war their farmland resembled a moon-landscape because of the many craters from missiles that had hit left and right of the Wencopper- weg. At one moment a big bomb ran bouncing through the space between their farm and the barn and it had exploded in the field at the back of the farm. On the other side of the tracks it was even more dangerous since the fighters often still fired when pulling up. Besides the slaughterhouse Deptford also the farm of its neighbor Dirk Jan Klomp had been ruined in the long run. Van Vliet from Zeumeren had been a help at Hammer’s during that time at the white house that is now inhabited, located on the space of the waste disposal site of Vink. Smit used to live in the house at the back of this. Van Vliet had told me later that Hammer used t o own a transmitter radio with which he was in direct contact with the English fighters. Van Vliet had to go to the field carrying a spade or a pitch-fork to try to spot German surveillance cars, and when he had seen one he had to drop the spade. At such moment Hammer would immediately stop transmitting. We had never understood before why these two men Hammer and Smit from The Hague had moved to the farm of Hein Spruijt in 1940.
One time an airplane had dropped, without obvious reason, a large bomb close to the Kapweg. Red-hot shell splinters had bounced to our haystack, below which was our underground shelter. During the spring of 1945 the haystack had been empty, and when the Canadians were already on their way, we still had to make a new shelter in the orchard. We spent exactly one night in that shelter, during the shelling of Voorthuizen and Prinsenkamp.
Some other time three smaller bombs or combat rockets had bounced over our farmland on the Plaggenweg and they had exploded a little further on. Also before that a fragmentation bomb had been dropped at Brink’s on the Plaggenweg, which had killed two cows and the horse had been so seriously injured by the splinters that it had to be killed. Even the cartridges of the quick-firing guns in the aero planes could be quite dangerous. At the neighbor’s house Van de Bor one of the cartridges fell right through the zinc corrugated iron of the haystack.
A V2 at lift off.
I had a really strange experience when I was burning the green of the potatoes near the farm some day. An English fighter pilot obviously had noticed the smoke and was curious about the cause, so he circled me several times very low and in very small loops, but he didn’t fire.
One night we heard a V1 fly over, it sputtered but flew on anyhow. I do not recall exactly how many V2’s we have seen but it must have been several tens, during the winter of 1944/1945, when we were ice skating on the frozen pool near Dasselaar, which later was made into the Zeumerse Plas. The V2’s were launched east of us, near Apeldoorn or Deventer, seemingly going straight up, as I have read later up to 100 km high. After a while you could only see the flame of the rocket as a small dot. Then this V2 came down in a free fall and hit the ground close to the harbor of Antwerp. The V2’s that were aimed at London have mainly been fired from The Hague.
Once when we were ice-skating we saw something very large falling from a plane and it came straight at us. We yelled “a bomb, a bomb” but we had no place to hide. We were really relieved to see that it was just a spare fuel tank. It fell quite close to us in a ditch connect-ed to the pool we were skating on.
The NSB train on Dolle Dinsdag (Mad Tuesday)
When on September 4, 1944, the allies had made good progress in their march through Belgium and the BBC had reported that the allies had reached Breda, many NSB members panicked and tried to escape to Germany, also by train. At night an English fighter noticed such a train close to the Stroërweg and he fired a flare above it. Then he started shooting the train and the passengers had tried to find cover in the ditches along the track. The pilot must have seen this because he then fired the machinegun in the longitudinal direction of the ditches.
As I went over the next day I saw that both the NSB survivors and the tens of dead bodies had already been carried away. Some of the farmers in the area had been forced to supply transport with their horses and wagons. There hadn’t been any guards watching the burned-down carriages and I recall that there were many burned bicycles and typewriters and also other burned luggage. But I also saw rags of skirts, trousers and stockings which were hooked to the high fences with barbed wire next to the ditches. These rags were what was left over from the clothing of the people on the train, who had tried to escape from the bullets and the fire but had been entrapped between the fences. I went through one of the burned carriages and I noticed a separate hand and also a naked foot that had been shot off. Furthermore I found twenty notes of one hundred guilders, shot to pieces. A friend of mine from Haarlem who came over to our house on a delivery cycle with an egg case to give me a radio and also to ask for some food for the way back, had promised me that he could change the notes for me at the Netherlands Bank, but we have never seen this friend again. The amount equaled about seven years wages of a farm hand, but I couldn’t think too much of it. It had come from the NSB men we hated and the money hadn’t been made with honest work. I was breeding geese at that time and also by growing and selling tobacco a young boy could make a lot more money than he could spend sensibly. There was nearly nothing one could buy except when using coupons.
Bicycles and horses
Other famous attacks at trains included the one on a train at De Hollander of which a carriage carrying German Consi cigarettes caught fire and the cigarettes had been distributed among the firemen and the civilians. Then there was the attack on the ammunition train near Stroe, with the particularly spectacular long sputtering fire afterwards. After such attacks I would bring home hands full of cartridges. At home we would pull out the bullets using pliers, poor out the powder and put it in a bench vice, then use a nail to make the percussion-cap explode. These bangs were our fireworks and they were not without danger for face and hands, because sometimes the percussion-cap would shoot out.
In particular near the end of the war, the Germans often lay claim to bicycles and horses. This way we lost two bicycles. The first one was my bike, claimed in Stroe, the second my sisters near the church in Kootwijkerbroek, only one day before the liberation. Our horse wouldn’t be caught by strangers and so we were able to keep the horse. Sometimes the Red Cross or the Dutch Food Supply ordered us to transport food or evacuees with horse and wagon. This would be done carrying a white flag on the wagon, although that was no guarantee that you wouldn’t be shot by the English fighters. This experienced Bertus Hooijer near Ede, who carried three evacuees and was sent to pick up a load of potatoes at a farmer in Wolfheze. On the way back, just before he reached the high trees along the road to Ede, the wagon was shot. Bertus was able to jump off the wagon and hide in time, but two out of three evacuees didn’t survive the shooting and the horse had run off onto the heathland.
Something funny happened to my brother in law Marinus van Ee in Westerhuis between Kootwijkerbroek and Harskamp, also on the last day before the liberation, when an officer was in need of a horse to pull his Volkswagen. The horse was with foal and it did not want to leave the farm without it. So the officer had taken the effort of pushing the foal in the back of the Volkswagen and had taken it with him. This was such a sight that the bystanders couldn’t help laughing but one of the people in hiding had whispered: “don’t laugh, don’t laugh”, because he was afraid that the officer would get angry and that would endanger them. Another German soldier had mounted the horse and then they rode off. All these bicycles and horses were needed desperately because of the lack of petrol and they needed to get away because they could already hear the shooting in the distance of the approaching Canadians on that Sunday. On the Wesselseweg I saw that Sunday a bus pulled by two horses and filled with German military, “escaping” slowly in the direction of Barneveld.
Airfights and anti-aircraft defence
I was eye witness to the following air fights and wins by the German air defence artillery:
- On November 26, 1942 I noticed that an English fighter plane, a Mustang, was shot down from the sky above Kootwijkerbroek by a German fighter. The plane crashed at only 400 meters from our farm in the field of Henk Bouwman on the Kapweg. The pilot hadn’t been able to save himself in time and he fell in a root tuber field behind Café Rijken (now called Café Wessel) on the Wesselseweg. Teacher Voerman from the School met de Bijbel, has for a short moment been able to speak to the pilot and took his name and age before the man died of his injuries. In around 1950 the mother of this pilot has visited Kootwijkerbroek and asked for information about the death of her son, among others at the mill Brons.
- One Sunday afternoon I was walking on the Kapweg when high up in the sky above me a thrilling so-called dogfight went on between a German and an English fighter. I remember that they tailed each other for minutes in a very close circle and every now and then I could hear shooting and I saw small smoke plumes come out of the plane in the back. After numerous circles the German plane in the front was shot severely and came down in a screw and slanting and, as later turned out, crashed on the Garderbroekerweg, close to Voorthuizen.
- Almost straight above us, an English fighter took out one plane from a large formation of low flying German bombers. This happened on January 1st, 1945, when the bombers were on their way to bomb the harbor of Antwerp, which was taken by the allies. The German plane that had been shot was a Messerschmidt, which crashed a little later in the Schaffelaarse Bos.
- Near the end of the war almost daily large groups of American bombers in close formations passed over the Netherlands, flying to Germany. When I think about it, I immediately hear the heavy oscillating sound.
It must have been during the summer of 1944 that above Soesterberg one plane from a formation of about ten, had been hit by the German artillery. It caught fire and crashed. The remaining squadron flew on undistracted, but already when flying over the airport Deelen a second plane was taken down. The losses of planes and crew were sometimes very high for the Americans. The English bombers usually flew by night and although the Germans used searchlights, the chance of being shot was still much lower than by daylight.
After the liberation
After the liberation several fields, such as at the mill in Kootwijkerbroek, were used for the small planes of the scouts. But on the day of our liberation, April 16, I haven’t seen any of these small planes. The Canadians had erected a commanders post at the yard of Van de Bor and at some distance from there, at Henk Malestein on the Kapweg, a canon was positioned with high stacks of crates with ammunition next to it. In the grassland in the front of the farm Van de Bor several searchlights were set up, using generators, with the light beams at night directed westward and just above the ground so that the dispersion of the light in the air would light their troops over a large distance. The orderlies drove back and forth in jeeps and on motorbikes and a network of telephone wires in all directions was attached to lamp posts and trees. When Bertha van de Bor played the organ that stood in a corner of the farm, playing the song “O dierbaar plekje grond” (O, cherished piece of land), she hadn’t known that this was a song with the same melody as the English anthem. How surprised she was when all the Canadian soldiers present had jumped up to stand at attention.
It may be clear from these stories that despite the war, for us boys this time had been very exciting.
Gert Jan van Elten, Voorthuizen