those are our people down there’

NOS News•today, 10:54

Almost eighty years after the Second World War, the Dutch pilot André Hissink still shuddered when he thought back to the bombing of the Maas bridges near Venlo in 1944. “They were so difficult. We didn’t want to go there.”

He imagines himself back in his cockpit when he talks about his bombing flights. “It was the hardest city I remember. Those damn bridges. From our height, those bridges were an indent of maybe two centimeters. So hard to hit. Left, bomb, go.”

Hissink tells his story shortly before his death in the podcast Bevriende Bommen. A podcast by NOS presenter Rob Trip about the often unknown stories about the Allied bombings in the Second World War. Thousands and thousands of people died in places such as Doetinchem, Eindhoven, Breskens, Huissen, Amsterdam, Westkapelle, Den Helder, The Hague and therefore also in Venlo.

Hissink is 103.5 years old – he attaches great importance to that six months – when he tells his story from Canada, his second home country. About 900 Dutch people were employed by the Royal Air Force as pilots or technicians on the ground. Hissink was the last Dutch RAF pilot who could still tell his story.

After fleeing the Netherlands at the beginning of the war, Hissink trained as a pilot because he felt it was his duty to help in the liberation of Europe. He made 69 bombing flights.

For him, targets in the Netherlands were really different from bombing raids over France or Germany. “Then you sit above your own country and you think: those are our people down there. We don’t want to harm them. You have to aim and drop those bombs as best as possible.”

A number of times he had to go to Venlo, to the railway and road bridge over the Maas. German soldiers had entrenched themselves around the bridge. They wanted to keep control of the bridge in order to get equipment and men from Germany to the Netherlands. The Allies wanted to prevent this.

“A difficult goal. And the Krauts knew that too,” says Hissink.

New podcast about Allied bombing in World War II

Many of the bombs did not hit the bridges, but Venlo itself, probably also that of André Hissink. The Seuren family lived in the middle of the city, near the Maas, in the autumn of 1944. For the podcast, Rob Trip visited the youngest son of the family.

Paul Seuren is the only child of the family who survived the bombing. Six brothers and sisters died instantly. Paul, a baby less than six months old, was found with his mother.

“She still had me in her arms and she was lying with me on the rubble. I heard that later from a neighbor. She even saw that my mother was lying there with me.”

She died two days later from her injuries. “She never knew the six children were dead.”

More than 200 people died in Venlo that fall of 1944 due to the bombings. The city was destroyed. The consequences can still be seen, just like in other cities: a lot of new construction alternating with an old building.

In the podcast, Rob Trip also addresses the question of whether victims of the bombings blame the Allies. Eighty years after the bombings, Paul Seuren is very resolute. “No,” he says. He says that the pilots had an impossible task: those bridges could not be hit from such a height with so many anti-aircraft guns.

“I’ve never been extra angry about that. How do they say that nowadays? We were collateral damage,collateral damage.”