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Like Pieter de Hooch. The spirit which a Princess of Orange called for in her people has already done wonders in their land. Six years have passed since the white parachutes and bombs first fell from a mild May sky. One year has passed since the invaders were routed, leaving The Netherlands' cities in ruins and nearly 10% of her fields flooded. In that year the brine-soaked polders (fields reclaimed from the sea) have been drained, and some are again growing grass for Holland's dairy herds and grain for Holland's bread. The sandy flats along the North Sea are ablaze again with tulips and hyacinth and narcissus. Broken windows are neatly patched, the cities' rubble cleaned up. Everywhere men are painting doors and balconies and polishing the brass door knobs. On shattered, flooded Walcheren Island, thrifty Hollanders are rooting up German antiglider traps to use for kindling, and to brace the rebuilt dikes. Holland again looks almost as neat and orderly as a Pieter de Hooch interior.
Life in The Netherlands a year after V-E day is not easy. People are shabbily dressed, but plans to revive and expand the textile industry are moving forward. People have almost enough to eat (1,900 calories a day) but many of the precious Dutch delicacies are missing; almost all the cheese is being exported to get foreign exchange. Food is still too scarce to make up for the starvation years. In the last agonizing months under the Nazis, Dutchmen ate only 400 calories a day; they are still unwontedly thin and pale.
Fuel is still scarce. Wilhelmina, like her subjects, got only half a ton of coal last winter. But production in the Limburg mines is coming back; in 1947 it should reach seven-ninths of the prewar output, and be almost normal by 1948.
Despite their shortages, the Dutch public will not tolerate a black market, though there is some illegal traffic in cigarets (the legal weekly ration is 40). Dealers in the "poison market," as it is labeled by the Government, are sent to Veenhuizen prison to make shoes, one of Holland's scarcest commodities.
Of Beer & Bicycles. Confidence in Holland's future pervades the moist spring air. The Royal Dutch Airlines is resuming biweekly flights to New York in a few weeks. Trains between Amsterdam and The Hague, which last year took seven hours to make a trip, are back on their old schedules and running every hour. The famed Heineken Brewery at Amsterdam is opening again. Philips, Europe's greatest exporters of electric bulbs and radio equipment, is operating at 60% of capacity, expects to hit 100% soon. The Dutch, who use bicycles as Americans use autos, may have to wait until 1950 for new ones, and meanwhile will bump along on solid tires over unrepaired streets.
It was more important that the Dutch concentrate on getting back their prewar share of the world's ocean trade, because that would bring foreign exchange to buy raw materials to reconstruct, expand. The U.S. loan negotiations had gone smoothly —$200,000,000, half of it from Washington, half from private U.S. banks. The interest rate, 2¼%, expressed U.S. confidence in The Netherlands' future.