29 April 1945: With the defeat of Nazi Germany imminent, millions of Dutch citizens were still under the control of the occupying German army. Food was very scarce. The Allies tried to negotiate a cease fire so that American and British airplanes could fly into The Netherlands and drop food to the people.
The truce had not yet been agreed to by Germany, but on 29 April, Operations Manna and Chowhound began.
The first night, to test the feasibility of the project, two Royal Air Force Avro Lancaster four-engine long range heavy bombers of No. 101 Squadron—Bad Penny, crewed by Canadians, and a second ship flown by an Australian crew—were loaded with food at RAF Ludford Magna and flew into The Netherlands at barely 50 feet (15 meters) above the ground.
To drop the food they simply opened the bomb bay doors and the bags and packages fell to the starving people below.
With Flight Sergeant Robert Fairful Upcott, D.F.M., Royal Canadian Air Force, [service number R187858] leading with Bad Penny, the two Lancasters ¹ dropped their food on the Racetrack Duindigt at Wassernaar, near The Hague, then returned along the same corridor they had flown on the way in. At 2:00 p.m. that afternoon, another 200 Lancasters followed.
Over the next ten days, approximately 11,000 tons (9,979 Metric tons) of food were dropped by Royal Air Force Lancasters and U.S. Army Air Force B-17 Flying Fortress bombers.
¹ The second Lancaster was commanded by Flight Officer P. G. L. Collett, Royal Australian Air Force (A424149).
© 2018, Bryan R. Swopes
Firstly Bryan, thank you for sharing all your amazing work.
Clicking on This Day in Aviation History first thing in the morning has become a cherished ritual for me. And, as a life long student of all history, I appreciate that you spend as much effort relating the human story as you do the technological history. As you obviously well know, It’s people that design, build and fly aircraft.
Having traveled through Holland, and been thanked in the most heartfelt way, for the liberation of Holland (despite me being born 22 years after the end of WW2), I was especially touched by your 29 April 1945 piece on Operations Manna and Chowhound. I’ve since done a little poking around on the internet and came up with this…
Although it’s a children’s book, the research behind it goes far beyond it’s 32 pages, and tells, in detail, about the famine, the operations and, very importantly, the crews that risked their lives flying bomb bays full of food, through enemy skies.
Thank you again.
Rob
http://www.badpennybook.com/about.html
Thank you very much, Rob. Your kind words are appreciated. —Bryan
Hey Bryan, as another who is interested in this story i would like to remind everyone that Flight Engineer John Corner should also have D.F.M. beside his name. Both he and Flight Sergeant Bob Upcott won their D.F.M. on the same mission over Cologne on March 2nd 1945.
Thanks for that Rob. I fixed it. —Bryan
In the late 1980s and early 90s I was stationed at NATO Airbase Geilenkirchen, which was between the German town of Geilenkirchen and the border with the Dutch province of Limburg and the town of Brunssum. The west end of our runway was right on the border.
Lack of food and potential mass starvation was a huge problem at the end of WWII.
One of my American friends had a German landlord who absolutely hated the British. He had been a child at the end of the war when the British controlled the area, and because of the lack of food on the Dutch side, the British had let the Dutch civilians come over into Germany and take from the Germans all the food they could find.
I often ate in Dutch restaurants just over the border. The local Dutch on the border still did not like the Germans very much. Altho all Dutch learned Dutch, English, and German languages starting in grade school, the staff at my favorite place disliked the Germans so much they would refuse to speak German to German customers. If a German spoke to them in German, the waitress would reply… in English. I asked the staff to teach me some Dutch, but after a couple lessons, they made me stop, because, having already learned some German, I spoke Dutch with a German accent. They hated that. These were kids in their 20s, but they had learned from their parents and grandparents who remembered World War II. They were not happy with the American draw down in the 90s because they didn’t think anyone else could keep the Germans under control.
Many of the more senior German officers I worked with were kids at the end of World War II. They had some interesting stories. One of them had Thanksgiving dinner with some of us Americans one November. He commented on the corn being served, saying that when he was a kid at the end of World War II, the Americans imported corn from the USA to help feed the Germans. As a kid he thought this was punishment for losing the war, because the Germans used corn only to feed their cattle.