The little Dutch boy who saved his country by plugging the dike with his fist was missing last week. His duty this time would have been to blow up the Moerdijk Bridge, longest on the Continent, connecting Rotterdam and the heart of The Netherlands with south Holland across the 1∧ mile wide Hollandsch Diep (joint estuary of the Maas and Waal Rivers). A gallon of well placed nitroglycerin would at least have delayed the German armored column which, having raced 85 miles westward in less than 86 hours (TIME, May 20), clanked across to reinforce Nazi parachute and air ferried troops beleaguered on the river islands south of Rotterdam.
But no one set the 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.
At 6:58 p.m. on May 14, The Netherlands was told she had capitulated to her first "protector" since Napoleon Bonaparte set up his brother Louis as her King in 1806.
General Henri Gerard Winkelman, Commander in Chief of the Dutch armed forces, made the announcement in the absence of Queen Wilhelmina and Premier Dirk Jan de Geer, who had fled to England:
"There was no other way. ... If we had fought on, not only our Army would have been destroyed but all civilians, women and children. . . . Today Rotterdam had her terrible share of what bombing means, and Utrecht, Den Helder and other centres were threatened likewise. . . . Our Air Force was too weak. . . . We were left to ourselves and so I had to make a grave decision which was a very difficult one for me to lay down our arms. ... All I can say is, trust in the future, behold your traditions. Long live Her Majesty the Queen! Long live the Fatherland!"
Safe in London, Dutch Foreign Minister van Kleffens announced that one in four of his country's 400,000 soldiers was killed, the Royal Guard 80% wiped out. Military men had difficulty believing these high figures, concluded they must have included deaths anticipated if the fighting had gone on. When it stopped, the Dutch, who had given up the northeast half of their country with little resistance and retired in good order from their first line of defense along the Ijssel River, still held their Grebbe Line (second defense) and Holland Water Lines (third). They had mopped up most of the parachutists in and around Amsterdam. They still had The Hague, Leiden, Utrecht, Den Helder. They still held, with British and French, the island province of Zeeland in the rivers' mouths. But further resistance did indeed seem hopeless. Whole towns were bombed off the map. The flood water had not risen above the main causeway roads. Dutch glumness and anger at the surrender was directed chiefly at the Allies for not coming more strongly, Queen Wilhelmina for not staying.