Operations Manna, Chowhound and Faust provided food to relieve a famine in the 1944–1945 German-occupied Netherlands. By May 1945, about 20,000 people in the Netherlands had died of starvation and three million were surviving on an ever-diminishing supply of food. The main area impacted by the famine encompassed the large cities in the west. The operations were undertaken by Allied air and ground forces in the last ten days of World War II. A truce with the German occupiers permitted the relief operation to be carried out.
Manna (29 April – 7 May 1945), air-dropped 7,000 tonnes of food into the Nazi-occupied western part of the Netherlands. The operation was carried out by British Royal Air Force (RAF) units and squadrons from the Royal Australian Air Force (RAAF), Royal Canadian Air Force (RCAF), Royal New Zealand Air Force (RNZAF) and Polish Air Force squadrons in the RAF. Chowhound (1–8 May 1945) dropped 4,000 tonnes of food and was accomplished by the United States Army Air Forces. Faust (2–9 May 1945) was a ground operation carried out by the Canadian army which delivered 7,000 tons of food. In total, 18,000 tonnes of food were air dropped or trucked into the occupied Netherlands over 11 days. The war ended in the Netherlands with the 8 May overall surrender of Nazi Germany.
Operations Manna, Chowhound, and Faust staved off a more extensive famine in the Netherlands. With the end of the war, the Allies sent additional large quantities of food into the Netherlands to relieve food shortages.
Nazi Germany invaded and occupied the Netherlands in May 1940. The famine began in the occupied Netherlands after the failure of Operation Market Garden (17–25 September 1944), the Allied offensive in southeastern Netherlands aimed at opening up an invasion route into Germany, and the simultaneous strike by Dutch railway workers. After Market Garden, the Germans temporarily prohibited food from being transported from rural eastern Netherlands to the urbanized and heavily populated western Netherlands. The strike by railway workers, which persisted until the end of the war in May 1945, disrupted the transport of food, especially the potato harvest in fall 1944. These two factors plus a diminished level of food reserves held by the Dutch government, the flooding of much agricultural land by the Germans as a defensive measure, a colder than average winter, the forced export of food and workers from the Netherlands to Germany, and Allied bombing contributed to the severity of the famine.
Most of the hardships during the famine were suffered by the urban population (2.6 million people) in the western Netherlands. Deaths are estimated at about 20,000. At its lowest, the daily ration provided by the Dutch government was two slices of bread and one pint of watery soup per person. The British and American allies were initially reluctant to respond to Dutch requests to send food because they feared the food would fall into German hands. Sweden and Switzerland, neutral countries, and the Red Cross (ICRC) sent shiploads of food to the Netherlands from February to April 1945 and added an additional 200 to 400 kilocalories (800–1,700 kilojoules) of food energy daily to the diet of the residents in the cities, but that was far from sufficient to relieve the famine. The official ration was supplemented by a black market and "food trekkers" journeying on foot or by bicycle to the countryside to buy or trade for food.
In April 1945, with the surrender of Germany on the near horizon, negotiations between the Germans and Dutch officials resulted in an agreement to request air drops of food by the Allied air forces and for food to enter the Netherlands via military trucks. Remaining in German control was the area west of the Grebbe Line where the four largest cities of the Netherlands were: Amsterdam, Rotterdam, The Hague, and Utrecht. The situation in those cities at the end of April was near catastrophic with official rations amounting to only 364 kilocalories (1,520 kilojoules) daily. On 1 May, Dutch food officials in the German-occupied part of the Netherlands said they had no more food to distribute.
The negotiations also resulted in a local truce between the advancing Allied armies (mostly Canadian) and the Germans. The Allies feared that as a defensive measure the Germans might destroy the dikes holding back the Atlantic Ocean and flood much of the Netherlands. Twenty-six percent of the Netherlands is below sea level. Eisenhower sent a warning to the German military commander that he "would be punished if the Germans intensifed Dutch suffering."
The German army in the Netherlands surrendered to the Allies on 5 May 1945. World War II in Europe ended on 8 May when Germany surrendered.
On 2 April 1945, German Reichskommissar Arthur Seyss-Inquart told Dutch food officials that he was willing to negotiate a truce in the western Netherlands to permit entry of food into the German-occupied Netherlands. On 12 April, Seyss-Inquart agreed with the Dutch that if Allied forces halted at the Grebbe Line and ceased military operations in the Netherlands, he would support an Allied effort to send food aid to Netherlands territory still occupied by the Germans. Dutch Prime Minister in exile Pieter Sjoerds Gerbrandy briefed British Prime Minister Winston Churchill and Prince Bernhard briefed Allied Supreme Commander Dwight Eisenhower on the opportunity to aid the starving urban Dutch population. On 23 April, Eisenhower was authorized by the U.S. and British governments to begin planning a relief operation. Eisenhower had already tasked Air Commodore Andrew Geddes with planning.
On 26 April Seyss-Inquart agreed with Dutch authorities to permit air drops of food. On 27 April Seyss-Inquart met with British military authorities and on 30 April with Eisenhower's deputy Bedell Smith. The discussions led to an agreement that Allied planes would be permitted to fly in designated corridors without being fired upon by the Germans and that food could be dropped in 10 designated drop zones without interference from the Germans.
Tasked with planning, British officer Andrew Geddes first decided that air dropping would be the best method of delivery. Not enough parachutes were available for each parcel however and airplanes couldn't land safely in the Netherlands because the Allies had bombed all the airstrips. They also worried that the planes and crewmen might be taken captive by the Germans if they landed. Geddes experimented with trial drops of sand bags and found that the bags burst hitting the ground when dropped from an altitude of 500 ft (150 m), but that drops at slow speed from 400 ft (120 m) were successful. The low altitude of the drops dictated daytime operations only.
Coordination with the occupying Germans was necessary to designate flight corridors and drop zones to preclude the Germans firing on the aircraft bearing food. The Germans feared that the Allies might use the aid drops as a cover for a military attack. On 26 April Geddes and British general Freddie de Guingand met with German officers in Achterveld, a village in the Canadian-conquered part of the Netherlands. The officers agreed on air corridors, drop zones, and other details, although the German officers did not have the authority to approve the operation. That decision was pushed up to Seyss-Inquart.
Operation Manna was the British operation, named after the miraculous food described in the Bible. On April 29, despite the fact that the Germans had not yet formally agreed to a ceasefire (Seyss-Inquart would do so the next day), Geddes undertook a test flight to see if the Germans would adhere to the tentative agreement not to shoot at Allied aircraft bearing food. On that morning, two RAF Avro Lancasters carrying food instead of bombs flew to the Netherlands, dropped the food at a racetrack near The Hague, and returned safely to Britain after an operation that lasted only a little more than two hours. With that success, the BBC announced that hundreds of British military aircraft would drop food at six designated drop zones that afternoon. Two hundred forty Lancasters dropped 526 tons of food that day. The Lancasters flew at very low altitudes with German guns pointed at them. The Germans had laid out bed-sheets to identify drop zones. German intelligence personnel stood by to check the food bags as they landed to ensure that no weapons were dropped. Tens of thousands of Dutch citizens descended upon the drop zones. Despite the risk of chaos as hungry people rushed to the drop zones, the reception of the food drops was well organized. Geddes had called on Prince Bernhard, commander of the Dutch army, to organize Dutch reception and distribution committees.