Dutch Power in the U.S.

Some years before American economic and cultural power began to penetrate the Netherlands, Dutch officials sought greater influence within the United States with a dedicated wartime public diplomacy outreach. The Netherlands Information Bureau (NIB), established in 1941, not quite a year after the Nazi invasion of Holland, sought to win greater American sympathies for the besieged country, and at least deflect US criticism, if not win direct American support. In this brief excerpt from my forthcoming book I show how American power in the Netherlands had its origins with Dutch power in the U.S.:

During the war it would first fall to Dutch officials to pursue relations between the two countries, with the aim of enticing America, with all its great productive capacity, to come to the aid of the beleaguered Netherlands. This was a fraught undertaking. Determined to scrupulously maintain its policy of neutralism in the 1930s, Dutch officials had commenced very little of the diplomacy that would be necessary later to forge a military partnership after the invasion of the Netherlands in May 1940. The same was true on the American side, as the United States would continue to chart a neutralist course even after the fall of Holland.

Once the US entered the war in December 1941, a cautious military cooperation ensued. Little known in the annals of Allied military cooperation were several squadrons of Dutch flyers who trained at American air bases and went on to contribute to MacArthur’s Pacific force.[1] Primarily based in Jackson, Mississippi, in 1943 those flyers staged two trans-continental practice raids, one early in the year to the west coast, and one in early July from Jackson up through the Midwest. Underinformed Americans might be forgiven for thinking they were under attack from the air, as the Dutch bombardiers and navigators practiced their skills by targeting the towns and cities below. As the squadron made its way between landing points, its simulated bombing runs were joined by local air raid organizations on the ground practicing their own drills. For added publicity, local VIP’s enjoyed rides on the squadrons’ B-25s.

The simulated bombing run had been the brainchild of Willard Wichers, director of the Holland, Michigan branch of the Netherlands Information Bureau (NIB). Years before US Cold War agencies began to blanket Europe with informational and cultural diplomacy, Dutch officials had established a public diplomacy outreach to the Americans. The B-25 practice flights were part of that much vaster outreach. The intention of the bombing stunt was to showcase the willingness of the Dutch to fight and thereby counter still-prevalent American perceptions that European publics were unwilling to sacrifice on their own behalf. The wartime public diplomacy of the NIB was a first attempt to mobilize American power, and it would illustrate all the challenges and complexities with which Dutch officials would have to deal later.
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Virtually within hours of the seating of the London government-in-exile, Foreign Minister Eelco N. van Kleffens established the Regeringsvoorlichtingsdienst [RVD; Government Information Service] as a communications hub between the occupied Netherlands, the government-in-exile, and the outside world. Van Kleffens recognized information as one of the sole remaining reserves of Dutch influence during the war. Seeking to amplify this capacity through modern communications, the RVD instituted links with the occupied Netherlands that included Radio Oranje, as well as contacts with the illegal and underground press, and also press offices in Lisbon, Bern, Pretoria, and Stockholm, with other offices in smaller cities. The RVD also provided the nominally independent magazines Vrij Nederland [Free Netherlands] to Dutch agents around the world and the Knickerbocker Weekly in the United States. By 1944, nearly 10 percent of the government-in-exile personnel worked for the RVD.[2] The RVD’s most important asset was the Netherlands Information Bureau, the offices of which were established in March 1941 at Rockefeller Center. The NIB’s field of operations included the western hemisphere save Surinam and Curacao, which were connected directly to London. The NIB answered to the RVD and to the press section of the foreign ministry, with half its budget coming from the London government, half from the nominally independent Netherlands East Indies, not yet occupied by the Japanese. Subsidiary NIB branches were located in San Francisco, Holland, Michigan (owing to the large Dutch-American immigrant community there),Washington, DC, and also a small office in Boston; offices in Montreal and in Buenos Aires were added later.[3]

Dutch public diplomacy was hastily erected in the period of American neutrality and its primary mission was to convince the Americans to enter the fight. Resources to accomplish this task were limited. Occupied Holland was at war and the Americans were showing no stomach for involvement. How to get this great country, with its vast potential, involved? How to convert the cultural influences that had predominated prior to the war into the industrial and military links that might save occupied Holland? The assistant director of the NIB, Jakob “James” Huizinga—son of the great historian, Johan—recognized the dilemma early. What Americans knew of the Netherlands were tropes of what Huizinga derided as “pretty little Holland”: tulips, windmills, the great masters. But these images of “little Holland,” as Huizinga observed, also suggested Dutch weakness and resistance to fight. Dutch information programming should fight the idea of “pretty little Holland” because tulips and windmills drew attention to the “pygmy” nature of Holland and animated American “anti-pygmy rule” sentiments. “Just as Mussolini waged a campaign against the idea of picturesque Italy,” Huizinga counseled, “so we should at every opportunity fight the idea of ‘pretty little Holland.’”[4] The problem would be a recurrent one for Dutch officials: winning American involvement was not only a matter of geopolitical argument, it was a matter of cultural affinity, or, how to convert the tropes of “little Holland” into American interest in the global capacities of the Dutch empire—a “big Holland,” perhaps. The NIB had to walk a thin line between a “little Holland” deserving of pity and aid, and a militarily capable Holland standing independently of its brave ally. This was no easy ideological task, as Huizinga recognized.


[1] Amanda Lyons and Will Morgan, “Patriots without a Country: Dutch Wings over Jackson,” The Journal of Mississippi History (Fall 2013).  Only the Chicago Defender noted that some residents of Jackson, Mississippi were “astounded” to discover that some of the Dutch flyers were Indonesians. “Democracy Of Dutch Flyers Astounds Dixie,” Chicago Defender, 16 May 1942.

[2] Bert van der Zwan, “De Regerings Voorlichtingsdienst (RVD) te London, 1940–1945,” in Van der Zwan, et al., Het Londens Archief: Het Ministerie van Buitenlandse Zaken tijdens de Tweede Wereldoorlog (Amsterdam, 2003), 39.

[3] Jan van de Ven, “De Regeringsvoorlichtingsdienst in London, 1940–1954 (Ph.D. dissertation, Katholieke Universiteit Nijmegen, 1988), 42.

[4] James H. Huizinga, “Memorandum on N.E.I. Propaganda in the USA,” Oct. 1942, inv. nr. 5728, Londens Archief, NA.

​--David J. Snyder