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Tragic Discoveries from the Canadian Indigenous Schools and other Events

Khalid Elhassan July 27, 2021 37 min

Painting by Kent Monkman of the tragic seizure of Indigenous children by the RCMP to place in mandatory boarding schools. Pintrest

German soldiers march through Belgium in 1914. Wikimedia

17. When the Germans Tried to Economize on the Manpower Necessary to Guard the Belgian-Dutch Border in World War I

In World War II, Germany invaded both the Netherlands and adjacent Belgium in order to get at France from the northeast. However, in the First World War, the Germans invaded only Belgium, and the Netherlands remained neutral. That left a lengthy border between the two countries, through which smugglers, spies, and saboteurs, slipped back and forth, and prisoners of war escaped to freedom. By the end of 1914, over a million Belgians had crossed into the Netherlands as refugees. The task of guarding the porous border tied down many German soldiers. Soldiers who were desperately needed elsewhere.

When the war began in August 1914, it was greeted with great enthusiasm by millions, who expected that it would last for only a few weeks or months at most, and would be over by Christmas. Instead, the conflict turned into a horrific bloodbath. It was stalemated in attritional combat in the trenches of the Western Front, which stretched for hundreds of miles from the Swiss border to the North Sea. So the Germans wracked their brains to come up with ways to economize on the manpower necessary to guard the Belgian-Dutch border. The results were tragic for many.

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.