What Dutch Civilians Said When Canada's Army Arrived After the Hunger Winter

In April 1945, the Dutch newspaper De Gelderlander published an editorial addressed to every Canadian soldier still stationed in the Netherlands, thanking them for liberation and urging the governments that held them to send them home. Nijmegen had endured a catastrophic American bombing in February 1944 that killed 772 civilians, six months on an active front line, and temperatures of minus fifteen degrees Celsius before the city was finally clear. The editorial appeared as the First Canadian Army pushed north through the lowlands while the occupied Netherlands to the north was still recovering from a winter famine that had killed more than twenty thousand people.