Miscellaneous
In this chapter one can find the other articles on the Dutch armament that are not related to the previous chapters. The direct links to the articles are found in the left margin of this page.
The Dutch army had not a single tank operational in May 1940. Besides a Renault FT-17, which had been bought just to test fortifications and inundations, not a single tank had ever been procured or even tested. When the army requisitioned these weapon systems on a demand list that had been filed at the Ministry of Defence in the mid thirties, the Minister had laid it off as 'undesired'. At first the request for tanks had been laid off for reasons of more urgent other equipment to be procured, but when the army consisted that tanks were an imperative addition to the weapons arsenal of a modern army, a senior officer (and later Minister of Defence) added that the Spanish civil war had proven tanks redundant, for basic anti-tank guns had created havoc amonst the Pz.I squadrons of the German expeditionary force. That this senior officer couldn't have been more wrong, would be proven in the decade to follow. It helped the anxious Dutch generals little to none. They were given no more than the concurrence of procuring a handful of wheeled AFV's. The Dutch army in 1940 would oppose the Germans with no more than a mere 32 modern AFV's. Of those 26 had been made and bought in Sweden, the other six were a product of Dutch manufacturer DAF.
The Dutch designed AFV was closely related to a very capable other DAF product: the Trado truck. This truck had an ingeneous suspension and drive, capacitating it to negotiate very rough terrain and abling it of towing heavy loads. An excellent product, that tempted the army to procure many of these trucks for heavy artillery units and all other services in need of terrain going trucks.
The Dutch defence strategy was entirely based on the WWI concept of trench and fortification warfare. It was not that the Dutch generals were so bold-headed that they considered that the winning strategy, but the small Dutch army and its poor quality made any other strategy quite unfeasible. As a consequence of the fixed position defence doctrine, a plan was developed to construct a vast number of casemates (bunkers) along the defence-lines crossing the country. The far majority of these pill boxes were small concrete structures holding one or two machineguns and capable of withstanding light and medium shelling. At strategic points, usually large bridges - of which the Netherlands had many hundreds given its dense structure of waterways, larger bunkers were built. These contained antitank guns and heavy machineguns and these were able to withstand heavy shells and even aerial bombs to some degree.
Chemical warfare had been seen throughout the WWI episode and again in the thirtees when Japanese and Italian forces applied those horrible agents on the battlefield. To some extent the Dutch had grown an interest in these weapons, because they could quite cheaply cause a potential opponent to respect the Dutch neutrality should the Dutch contain a capable war storage of battle agents. Soon enough though, the Dutch left that thougth. Nonetheless quite extensive research was done to the fabrication of agents and moreover to the protection of the army against enemy application of battle agents.
