大象传媒

This is an extract from an interview with Stan Hook taped on 14/07/03 and added to the site with his permission by Rob Illingworth of the Folkestone Heritage Team.
The interviewee fully understands the site's terms and conditions.

Stan Hook was also a motorcycle messenger boy in the Auxiliary Fire Service. His account of the London Blitz, especially the bombing of Docklands and the City of London, has been published in "We Remember the Blitz" compiled by Frank and Joan Shaw.

This is a sore point with me. the history books got it all wrong. I was reading something somewhere or listening to a programme and they said that the Swiss were responsible for the relief of Rotterdam. I thought "The Swiss! It was us! I was there! What the hell are they on about?" I was so indignant about this that I went to the War Office and I told them. They said. "No, no- it was the Swiss." So I felt so strongly about this, I even went over to Rotterdam and found the mayor and went to the mayor's office and said: " Your history books are wrong!"

Now what had happened, the Swiss had organised it, the Swiss Red Cross... But what happened [was that] there were about 5 or 6 tank landing craft and they loaded us up with food ...All the Dutch people in Rotterdam thought that the allies were going to get there before Christmas [1944] but Winter set in, it was a hard Winter... and they got bogged down. So Rotterdam wasn't [liberated.]
So the people of Rotterdam said: "we're not going to support the war effort in any way, shape or form. We're on strike." So the Germans said: "No work, no food" So they never had any food. When we got there, there were kids, they were walking skeletons.

What they did, they stripped our guns off [the landing craft] filled us up with food and we went into Rotterdam docks. There were German sentries on the docks. They were still in German occupied Holland! We took in the relief food for the people and we were told not to give the children any chocolate or things because they would be violently ill if we did. They'd not seen chocolate for months, years really. These poor little kids were running down to the docks to meet us and greet us and the Germans were telling them to "Go to hell, Get out of it!" How we kept our temper I don't know. We were told "No, you're not [acting as] military troops." We just unloaded all the stuff, all the food and then turned around and went.

Then, just after that, the allies took Rotterdam. But we did save a few lives I think, with our food. I will always remember that relief of Rotterdam because those poor people, those poor kids, middle of Winter, dressed in rags, they were literally living skeletons. Unfortunately, these are the sort of things that get lost in War.
To this day, the history books tell us that it was the Swiss that relived Rotterdam. It wasn't the Swiss, it was the British Navy.

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