Operation Manna - food from heaven in WW2

 by Deborah Swift

In the last few weeks we have heard a lot on the news about WW2's 80th anniversary of Operation Market Garden and Arnhem - the attempt by the Allies to free occupied Holland. It was only partially successful, leaving much of Holland still occupied and cut off from the rest of the Netherlands.

By the winter of 1944-1945, the Netherlands was in the grip of a severe famine, known as the "Hongerwinter" (Hunger Winter). The German occupation forces had cut off food and fuel supplies to the western part of the country, a region that included major cities such as Amsterdam, Rotterdam, and The Hague, which remained under German control. Above - Dutch children being fed soup during the famine.

The destruction of transport infrastructure by bombs and sabotage made it nearly impossible to distribute whatever food was available. By April 1945, millions of Dutch civilians were facing starvation. An estimated 20,000 people had already died. The situation was dire, and the Dutch government in exile, along with the Dutch resistance, appealed to the Allies for help.

Operation Manna was the response to this desperate plea for assistance. Named after the biblical manna that fed the Israelites in the desert, the operation was conceived by the Royal Air Force (RAF) Negotiations were hastily arranged between the Allies and the German forces in the Netherlands. While the Germans were still an occupying force, they were also aware that they were losing and were perhaps motivated by a desire to avoid post-war retribution. Eventually, truce was agreed to allow unarmed bombers to fly low over Dutch territory and drop food supplies without being fired upon.

The first mission of Operation Manna took place on April 29, 1945. Lancaster Bombers were loaded with food parcels instead of bombs. The aircraft flew at low altitudes, around 400 feet, over designated drop zones in the western Netherlands, including areas around Rotterdam and The Hague. The food parcels contained basic but essential supplies: flour, dried eggs, margarine, sugar, and tinned food. These items were packed in sacks and boxes that were designed to minimize the risk of damage when dropped from the planes.

Over the course of ten days, more than 3,000 sorties were flown by the RAF, dropping nearly 7,000 tons of food. The operation was a logistical triumph and a morale booster for both the Allied forces and the starving Dutch population. For many, these food drops were the difference between life and death.

For months, the Dutch people had been surviving on whatever they could find: tulip bulbs, sugar beets, and anything that could be scavenged. See the photo above of Dutch women transporting food. The sudden influx of supplies amazed the population, delivered from the skies by the sort of bombers that had once represented death and destruction.

The food drops did more than just prevent starvation, they also lifted the spirits of the population. Stories from those who lived through the Hunger Winter often recall the sense of relief and joy that accompanied the arrival of the food parcels. In many cases, the Dutch civilians gathered in the drop zones would wave at the Allied planes as they passed overhead.

Operation Manna continued until May 8th 1945, the day the Germans in the Netherlands officially surrendered to the Allies. This marked the end of the occupation and the beginning of the recovery for the Dutch people. The food drops, however, continued to be a crucial lifeline until normal supply routes could be restored.

The legacy of these operations endures to this day. Monuments and memorials in the Netherlands commemorate the food drops, and the operations are taught in Dutch schools as an example of international cooperation and humanitarianism.

For the airmen who participated, the missions were often among the most rewarding of their military careers. In my latest novel Operation Tulip, these food drops form part of the plot towards the end of the book. When researching I was taken by how moving the British airmen found these missions, to be sending aid not bombs, and how they recalled the Dutch waving from the ground. After five years of war, this must have been a heart-warming sight.

Operation Tulip is out now.

Lady Maud Hoare and the silver trowel by Janie Hampton

Lady Maud Hoare in 1941

Some years before she died, my mother gave me an old silver trowel as a birthday present. With its chunky, solid, ivory handle it has the weight and shape of a real builder’s trowel, and does the job of picking up cake and flans very well.
I recently received an email from the Royal Air Force College in Cranwell, Lincolnshire. They had found an empty presentation box with an indentation of a pointed trowel. Now they wanted to find the actual trowel that had been used to lay the foundation stone of their college in 1929. The box was duly sent to me, and sure enough, like Cinderella’s shoe, my trowel fitted. The only problem was, it had the wrong inscription. Made in Sheffield in 1926, the ornate inscription reads: 'Presented to the Lord Bishop of Chester, to commemorate the laying of the foundation stone of St Chad's Church, Blacon. June 11 1929.' (This Anglican bishop, Luke Paget, came from an unusual family: his father was Bishop of Oxford, one brother was the Archbishop of Central Africa and another an army general - their mother must have been very proud!)
RAF Cranwell College had been founded in 1920, and housed in barrack huts built during the First World War. In order to foster tradition and inspire the air cadets, they needed a permanent building. Sir Samuel Hoare (1880-1959), the Minister for Air since 1922, also understood that the RAF Cadet College was a temporary and precarious service and for the future defence of Britain, it was important that the RAF had equal standing with the other British armed forces, the navy and the army. Early in 1929, Sir Samuel formed a plot. He obtained the authority to commission architect’s plans for an RAF College and commissioned Sir James Grey West (1881 –1951), an eminent architect in the Office of Works. His first design was inspired by London’s elaborate Victorian-Gothic St Pancras Railway Station. This was rejected, possibly on grounds of taste. His second set of plans, based on the  Royal Hospital Chelsea designed by Christopher Wren in 1692, was accepted. But the Ministry of Air had no authority or budget from the government to construct the building, and a General Election was due in a matter of weeks. No expenditure had been authorised for anything other than the plans, and Sir Samuel could soon be out of office. There was no time to lose. Sir Samuel realised that whatever the outcome of the election, if the building of Cranwell College had started, whether the government was Conservative, Liberal or Labour, they were likely to finish it. The Marshal of the RAF, Lord Trenchard, (1873 –1956) and Sir Samuel quickly arranged for an official laying of the foundation stone before the dissolution of parliament. The night before, the RAF cadets held a clandestine mock ceremony, sharing caricature performances of the leading dignitaries.
The 29th April, 1929, was wet and windy but the ceremony went ahead. It began with a parade of the Cadet Wing, Airmen’s Wing and the College Band under the Assistant Commandant, Wing Commander Douglas Strathern Evill. Sir Samuel was received with the Air Salute, and after inspecting the Guard of Honour, joined the other guests on a wooden platform, erected in the field near the temporary huts. The VIPs included Lord and Lady Trenchard and Commandant of the RAF College Air Vice-Marshal Frederick Crosby Halahan, (1880 –1965), the architect Sir James Grey West and Sir Samuel’s wife, Lady Maud Hoare(1882–1962). Two years before she had been appointed Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire for flying 12,000 miles to inaugurate the London via Cairo to Delhi air service. The Times newspaper reported that ‘She is the first woman ever to fly so many miles. There had been snow, rain, fog, sandstorms, but not a spare part was needed for the air ship.’ 

Samuel Hoare VI as Honorary Elder Brother of Trinity House in 1956. By Aubrey Claud Davidson-Houston. 

With so little time to make arrangements, Sir Samuel probably borrowed a ceremonial trowel from his brother-in-law Luke Paget, the Bishop of Chester, who was about to perform a similar duty on a new church in his diocese. Or maybe Sir Samuel bought a new silver trowel, there was no time to inscribe it and he then passed it on to his brother in-law to lay the foundation stone of St Chad’s Church in Cheshire.
Sir Samuel handed the silver trowel to his wife Lady Maud who placed some cement onto the foundation. The first stone was lowered by a small crane into place. The Chaplain-in-Chief, the Venerable Robert Edward Vernon Hanson, (1866–1947) said a prayer and then Sir Samuel gave an address, before the parade marched past the saluting base to close the ceremony. 

This was an act of bluff to persuade the government to fund the building; and an act of faith that the next government, whoever they were, would finish the job now it had been started. On 30 May 1929, the Labour party, under Ramsay Macdonald, won the most parliamentary seats for the first time but failed to achieve an overall majority. However, the new ‘hung’ government accepted the RAF plan and proceeded with the building, which was finished in 1933. Sir Samuel then presented over 100 lime trees (Tilia x europaea) stating that an avenue was an ‘indispensable attribute to a great house’. And when tea was rationed during the Second World War, lime blossom made an acceptable alternative.

As a British M.P., in 1935 Sir Samuel piloted the India Independence Bill through the House of Commons and as Home Secretary, in 1938 introduced Kindertransport  to allow European Jewish children entry into Britain. A brilliant politician, he knew how to achieve his goals, even if it meant using his wife to wield his brother-in-law’s silver trowel. There might have been a different silver trowel, inscribed with the details, but no-one has found it. Unless a diary or note revealing any of this emerges, or the trowel appears one day on Antiques Roadshow or Cash in the Attic, we will never know.

Sir Samuel & Lady Maud, now Lord and Lady Templewood in 1957.

Why, you may ask, did my mother have this trowel? Well, the Bishop of Chester was her father-in-law; and Sir Samuel Hoare was both my step-great uncle and my grandmother’s third cousin so my third cousin-twice-removed. You can see the trowel on display at the RAF Cranwell Museum. http://www.aviationheritagelincolnshire.com/

RAF Cranwell College

Plotting the Second World War, by Clare Mulley

Earlier this month I was delighted to speak at a commemorative day at Tempsford, in Bedfordshire, being held in recognition of the RAF Special Duties Squadrons that delivered SOE's special agents behind enemy lines from the village’s top-secret airfield during the Second World War.

Memorial Plaque in Tempsford village church
(courtesy of Martyn Cox, www.secret-WW@.net)

Among the guests was Doreen Jeanette Galvin, nee Grey, a former member of the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force, better known as the WAAF. Doreen served as an Intelligence Officer at RAF Tempsford during the war. She now lives in Canada, and this was her first visit back to her wartime base. Finding a squashy sofa in the memorial hall, Doreen told me how moving it was to return to this tiny village, attend the service of remembrance, and see the beautiful memorial to both the female special agents who were dropped behind enemy lines, and the Special Duties pilots who flew them there.

What I was not expecting was for Doreen to tell me how she had plotted the Second World War. Not in an evil god-of-destruction way you understand, but as a WAAF processing data about aircraft movement provided by radar stations and observation posts, and plotting the changing positions of Allied and enemy planes on a map.

Me with Doreen Galvin at Tempsford, May 2015
(courtesy of Mary J Miles)

Doreen joined the WAAF in March 1941. Her family’s association with the British Air Force went back to the First World War, but it was not until the late autumn of 1940 that she decided to volunteer. The trigger was watching the Battle of Britain at close quarters from her south coast garden, which was on a steep hillside looking down to the sea. At one point the planes flew so low that she felt they might knock the television aerial off the roof of her house, and she threw herself into a ditch in the garden. When she looked up there were black crosses on each wing of a German fighter above her, which was followed by a Spitfire which shot it down into the sea. She knew then that she had to volunteer.

Doreen in uniform
(courtesy of Doreen Galvin & Martyn Cox, www.secret-ww2.net)

Doreen’s first position as a plotter was in Liverpool, receiving aircraft information and translating it into representative counters moved across a large map. On her third evening she found herself plotting the course of an enemy plane. Soon more followed; it was the start of the Liverpool blitz. Nothing could have better brought home to her the vital importance of her work, and how essential it was to be accurate.

Doreen's long and often exhausting career eventually led her to a Commission interview with ‘a very frightening Squadron Leader’ and, as the result of her courage to refuse the more regular roles she was encouraged to take in admin, or codes and ciphers, either of which she felt would ‘drive me crazy’, she was accepted for Intelligence.

Doreen in the WAAF
(courtesy of Doreen Galvin & Martyn Cox, www.secret-ww2.net)

Doreen was then trained as a Photographic Interpretation officer at RAF Medmenham in Buckinghamshire. Here she worked with Constance Babington Smith, known to all as ‘Babs’, who was ‘charming, not gushing, but she knew what she was doing’, as well as Sarah Churchill, the red-haired daughter of the PM, among others. Their role was to examine photographs and identify tell-tale troop movements, the build up of fleets and tanks, the creation of fuel and ammunition dumps, the construction and development of weaponry and key sites for military production and other bombing targets. Once, when particularly sensitive photographs and maps had to be examined, Sarah Churchill was segregated in the bathroom, with a 3-ply plank across the huge claw-foot bathtub on which to spread the pictures. She did not know it at the time, but she was working on images of North Africa. ‘We always used to say,’ Doreen told me with a laugh, ‘that for us, North Africa started in the bathroom’. 

Among a wealth of other material, including pictures of her family's former house in the Channel Islands (garden doing well, she noted), Doreen’s photographs provided early images of the German Messerschmitt 162 and 163 rocket planes. She also worked on photos of a series of ramps in northern France, all facing London. ‘It was obvious something was going to be shot off them’, Doreen said, but they couldn’t see what. Nearly two years later she was spending the night with a friend in Bromley when the first V1s to reach London ‘flew over the roof like an express train’. Wearing a hard hat on the early morning journey into work the next day she suddenly realized that these new flying bombs must be what she had been looking for at Medmenham. 

Doreen during the Second World War

(courtesy of Doreen Galvin)

After a year in Aerial Reconnaissance, Doreen moved to Bomber Command, with an office next to the famous ops room. From there she became an Operations Officer at RAF Feltwell, in Norfolk. At times it was almost unbearable work. One morning twelve planes left to bomb a hydroelectric station, and just one damaged aircraft returned late that afternoon. It was ten days before Doreen learned that she was in no way to blame for the high losses through any inaccuracies in her work - the planes had simply had the misfortune of coinciding with a Luftwaffe squadron.

Finally Doreen was sent to RAF Tempsford to work as an Intelligence Officer, without yet knowing the operational nature of the secret little airfield. On arrival she was surprised to see the odd variety of aircraft of all vintages and sizes that operated from the airfield, including a number of old-fashioned Lysanders, affectionately called ‘Lizzies’, which she thought must have come from the previous war. The intelligence office seemed ‘very dull’, the maps ‘uninspiring’, and Tempsford struck Doreen altogether as ‘a mediocre station, full of left-overs, in a forgotten backwater’.

A Lysander at Tempsford during the war,
with officers from Special Duties squadron 161
(courtesy of Hugh Verity & Martyn Cox www.secret-ww2.net)

Only after she was taken through a security door did Doreen see a map covering the entire wall opposite. ‘On it were hundreds of brightly coloured pins, each holding down a small label with a number and a code name typed on it.’ These represented the dropping and landing sites for Britain’s special agents and supplies across Europe. Her role was to ensure the pilots were fully briefed on the sites, and their routes, using aerial photographs and other intelligence. Doreen stared at the map in amazement, thinking, ‘If only the Germans could set eyes on this wall map, they could surely eliminate the entire Underground Movement in Europe in a week!’ 

Tempsford brought its own tragedies, although nothing quite on that scale, but also many lighter moments among friends who became very close. Here the WAAF Officers’ Mess was so close to the vicarage and the old stone church that one morning, after an RAF dance the night before, the vicar’s wife accused Doreen's friend of getting their chickens drunk. The hens had come wandering in unnoticed and drunk from the dregs of the slop bucket behind the bar. 

Doreen at the Special Duties memorial plaque in Tempsford Church
(courtesy of Martyn Cox, www.secret-WW@.net)

Reverend Margaret Marshall with Doreen Galvin
at Tempsford's memorial to the SOE women and Special Duties pilots
(courtesy of Clive Bassett)

Last Sunday, after the morning of talks, Doreen visited Tempsford’s old stone church again, this time for a service of remembrance conducted by the Reverend Margaret Marshall (how times have changed), before laying wreaths at the memorial opposite. For Doreen it had been a moving experience to return to the village where she had spent so much of her war, and to see that neither the special agents, nor the brave pilots who flew them behind enemy lines, have been forgotten. Not only are there beautiful memorials in the church and on the village green, but there are often events here which welcome everyone from family members who come to remember, to school children who may be hearing for the first time about the history of the village, the airfield, and the many brave people who once passed through.

Aerial photograph of RAF Tempsford during the war
(courtesy of The Bob Body Collection & Martyn Cox, www.secretWW2.net)

I am delighted that Doreen has written and self-published her memoirs, From Arts to Intelligence, available from Amazon in kindle and EPUB formats, and paperback. 

I should also mention that the very good Temspford commemorative event this May was organised by educational charity Secret WW2 for which, many thanks.

Copyright Clare Mulley

www.claremulley.com