MUSIC BY THE MARINES

Here's an album with music by the Band of the Netherlands Navy....

So yeah, the heroic struggle of these brave men in the defense of Rotterdam and elsewhere during the Second World War....

Yeah.... Well, my grandfather was one of them. When I was a kid I would spend every holiday with my grand parents, my grandfather served in Indonesia from 1936 till 1940 and he would always tell me all these wonderful stories about that far away country, his adventures there, flying over West-Papua and being shot at, arrows flying through these flying wooden crates with linen, he was all over the archipelago but most if his time, here in Indonesia he spend in Bandung, the city where I ended up.... He would also sometimes tell me about some of his adventures during the Second World War, his escapes from Nazi prison camps, his mates dying during battle, but on the whole he wouldn't talk about the fighting it self, "killing people is a terrible thing" he would say....

When he came back to Holland, in the beginning of May, 1940, on the ship The Van Galen the ship was bombed and sunk, at the port of Den Helder, one of his best buddies was standing next to him and a piece of shrapnel tore the heart out of the chest of his buddy.... He survived that bombing and left for Rotterdam where the real fighting began. He fought in a few places and ended up on the bridge over the Maas River, the Maas Bridge. The fighting there was very, very intense, often it was hand to hand combat, with guns, with knives... Towards the end of his life he told my brother how, at one point, they were getting shot at from the back, turned out to be Dutch Nazi collaborators, so he and a mate crawled to the building where those shots were coming from and he lobed a bunch of grenades through the window and those collaborators, in his own words were turned into red paint covering the walls and the ceiling of the room where they were shooting from.... He kept on fighting... At one point there were only a handful of them left. he and a mate were ordered to try to make it back to command at the nearby Oostplein (East Square) where the Marines (in Dutch we call them Mariniers) barracks were to rapport on the situation and get further orders, a suicide mission because they were under heavy sniper fire. He and his mate quickly penned a last goodbye letter to their loved ones and off they went. They both somehow survived and their mates who stayed on that bridge kept on fighting holding off great numbers of German invaders... When those guys finally gave up because they ran out of ammunition the Germans were expecting a whole battalion and they were stunned when only a handful of marines came out of their hiding place. The German commander was so impressed that he gave orders that all his men had to stand and salute these fierce fighters and the German commander called them Schwarze Teufel, The Black Devils and that's how they became known, The Black Devils From Rotterdam, and my grandfather was one of them.....

My grandfather then had a very short time to spend with his wife, my grandmother, they went through the bombing of Rotterdam together.... After the capitulation normal soldiers were just let go, but being an elite soldier they wanted my grandfather to sign a paper on which he declared that the war was lost and he would give up the fight which he refused and he spend the rest of the war in a German prison camp in Germany near a city called Stuttgart, escaping three times, one time walking all the way back to Holland with his best Marine buddy, we knew him as uncle Sit, a bear of a man, but each time he would get caught again and send back to the camp. I remember him telling me about how near the end there wasn't anything to eat but nettles. How, after they were liberated he saw Russian prisoners of war killing German camp guards with small razors cutting them into small pieces. How he and other prisoners had to go to bombed cities and remove bodies from the ruins.....

As a kid, when we had family birthdays, sometimes my grandmother would drink a few glasses of wine, and she would become all giggly, joking but one time she got really serious after being giggly and she told us the story of how she fared during the so-called Hunger Winter with her husband far away in a prison camp in Germany, all by her self with my mother and my mothers sister to care for. Like so many others she left Rotterdam, on foot with her two kids, trying to get food from farmers. The weather was terrible, it was snowing heavily, bitterly cold, and she was send away from one farm after another, without food, until she collapsed in the snow. And it is only because a farmer took pity on her and her kids, and followed her to help her that I am able to write this all down. I wish I would know who that farmer was!!!

When the old Maas bridges were destroyed and the new Willems Bridge was opened they had a huge party. The Queen came to open the bridge and my grandfather was asked to come and shoot a cannon to officially open that bridge....

He was one of the most kind and gentle men I have known and even to this day, some 30 years after he passed away, I still miss him (and my grandmother) terribly.....

Found this album and I just had to share all of this....

Anyway, here the album:

GET IT HERE

Here's a rapport he wrote about the fighting, written 17th of April 1950 (he spend some 35 years with the Marines) written in Dutch:

And here's a few pictures showing my grandfather:

And I hope some of you will enjoy this story.....

Enjoy!