Word: breda
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Like every other youngster at the Royal Military Academy at Breda, in the motherland, Cadet Hein ter Poorten had to make a choice before he entered. He had to decide where he would serve, and stick to his choice. He chose The Netherlands East Indies, went to his first post in Java rarely well-equipped. He was not only an artillery specialist. He was also an airman. After winning an international balloon race in Germany, he learned to fly an airplane in 1911, was one of the world's earliest military aviators...
Almost as annoying to the Nazis as the Beggars' lethal pranks is the uncompromising stiff-neckedness of all Hollanders. Typical of the Dutch attitude was the banquet given for the Germans by the Burgomaster of Breda, Barthelomeus W. Th. van Slobbe, onetime Governor of Curacao and a student of history. Compelled to throw an official party for the invaders, Van Slobbe served up a curious meal, topped it off with a flowery archaistic speech. Next day the Germans found he had copied menu and oratory verbatim from a similar occasion after the French conquered Breda...
...blacks, a machine-gun battalion, a company equipped with mortars, an artillery regiment with heavier 10-centimetre Ansaldos and Vickers 15.2s, two sapper companies with well-drilling and road-building equipment, a communications company with water trucks, two mopping-up units, support from the Air Force, using mostly Breda combat bombers, and from reserves, bringing total strength to about 250,000. This well-balanced striking force drove first for Salûm, five miles across the border...
Flushing, the best coastal harbor, and Den Helder, Holland's chief naval base, were heavily bombed, and even the ancient harbor of Stavoren on the Zuider Zee was shelled. Elsewhere, except in key defense towns like Breda, Tilburg and Maastricht, physical damage had not been great. For the rest, most of the great cities surrendered too quickly to be bombed...
...charge, or no one fired it. British troops which had reached Flushing to the southwest and Amsterdam to the north, a French mechanized force which had reached Breda to the southeast, were all too slow, powerless or witless to intervene. Dutch Foreign Minister Elco van Kleffens said German parachutists disguised as Dutch police prevented it. In any case, preceded by one last torrent of air bombs upon Rotterdam, which stubborn Dutch fighters had twice cleared of Nazis, the invaders rolled over the bridge and into the city...