The last cargo dropped by the Eighth Air Force was food for starving people. In late April, the Germans still held an iron grip on great parts of the Netherlands. To blunt the Allied advance and punish persistent Dutch resistance, the fanatical Nazi commanders had cut off food supplies to the people and opened the dikes, flooding much of the country’s low-lying farmland. By the spring of 1945, over 12,000 Dutch had died of starvation and another four and a half million were suffering from malnutrition, reduced to eating tulip bulbs when stocks of vile-tasting sugar beets ran out.
