HOLLAND MAKES READY

King Country Chronicle, Volume XXXIII, Issue 4812, 19 July 1939, Page 2

HOLLAND MAKES READY

DEFENCE PREPARATIONS. LARGE BUDGET PROVISION. Throughout the present year Holland has been making extensive additions to her various forms of national defence. It is reported from Amsterdam that a supplementary defence Budget of £4,000,000 has been introduced in the Netherlands Parliament, which means that the total defence expenditure for 1939 is more than £40,000,000. Holland’s system of military service is partly voluntary, partly compulsory, but it is provided that every citizen is liable to personal service between the

ages of 19 and 40. Both her normal standing army of 500,000 men and her navy of 60,000 tons (mostly small vessels for coastal defence and patrol work) are being greatly increased this year, which accounts for portion of the additional expenditure.

So far as the navy is concerned, special attention is being paid to equipping the service with many super-speed patrol boats, lightly armed, but capable of extraordinarily rapid action on the hit-and-run-again principle. These boats are being built for Holland by British firms, who are also under contract to the British Admiralty for a similar class of vessel. Fortresses and Dykes.

Another large portion of Holland’s defence expenditure is on a special

scheme of frontier protection, similar in some respects to those adopted by Belgium and Denmark, but including many unique features. Chief among these is what is known as the "cement guerrilla” system—a multitude of midget forts scattered over a wide ribbon of frontier territory.

The idea is that an invading enemy, instead of being able to concentrate its offensive and destructive power on a few large fortresses, would encounter —often unexpectedly—a host of small ones, many of which could be destroyed without in the least affecting the efficiency of the rest. Then there are the Dutch water defences—the dykes. The use of these by Holland is traditional, but they remain as formidable to-day- as when they were first employed to hamper the movements

of advancing hostile forces. In the last year the dyke system on the borderlands has been vastly extended; and the frugal Dutch administrators have the comforting thought that, in addition to their military value, these waterways have great advantages in peace time. Indeed, they are part of the normal public works activities of the nation.

Rumania Also Prepared,

From Rumania, too, comes news of extraordinary military preparations in readiness for Europe’s danger period—the summer months. The Premier, M. Calinescu, has informed Parliament that £3,000,000 have been spent in four months on the fortification of the Hungarian frontier, and in the same period no less than £38,000,000 has been spent on war materials. For a country which,

comparatively, is by no means rich—a country of less than 20,000,000 inhabitants, 16,000,000 of which are rural dwellers, and most of these humble peasants—this is an enormous outlay. It will be used, no doubt, to complete Rumania’s “Maginot Line,” a vast protective system girdling the entire national territory, and described, when the work was inaugurated in the middle of 1937, as “a fence of stone and steel.” In addition there is the cost of modernising Rumania’s army, and increasing it from the 1936 total of 180,000 men in uniform.