To the Nazis, the Dutch coast offered vital staging posts for the planned invasion of Britain. An attack on the Netherlands looked inevitable. The Dutch, moreover, were ill-prepared to defend themselves. While other countries had relentlessly built up their armed forces in the 1930s, until as late as 1940 the Dutch possessed not a single tank, and had a collection of weapons mostly dating back to the 1800s. In a rare exception, the country had established a new regiment of 3000 soldiers after the First World War ended: a regiment of cyclists, with the motto ‘Swift and Nimble – Composed and
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