Word: zuider
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Almost from the start, the mission was hell in the heavens. The Germans attacked over Holland's Zuider Zee, never stopped for long. They used tactics and strength which they must have been cautiously hoarding for pre-invasion battles...
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...
...south through Nijmegen all the way to Maastricht, behind the Ijssel and Maas (Meuse) Rivers (see map). While this line held, the civilian population would be taken behind a second defense system, called the Grebbe Line, extending southeastward to Nijmegen from Eem on the Ijssel Lake (the diked, reclaimed Zuider...
...pulling plugs in the Albert Canal to impede any German advance with a flood. The Dutch, however, did say they were flooding their country, at least experimentally, around Utrecht. Much weaker than the 'Belgians in fortifications along their frontier, the Dutch prepared if necessary to open their Zuider Zee dikes and inundate most of their central provinces, abandoning their entire northeast to the invader and taking national refuge in the Rotterdam-Utrecht-Amsterdam triangle. To give their waters time to rise, the Dutch mined all roads and bridges entering their country from Germany. They erected tank obstructions and traps...
...French in Holland; the rest was to soothe a banking panic in Hamburg. Half her cargo was insured with Lloyd's. In the North Sea a storm hit her. With bare poles she ran before the wind, struck on the island of Terschelling at the mouth of the Zuider Zee, and sank in 50 feet of water...