I literally had no idea that Canada was friends with the Netherlands. It turns out, though, we are. And for pretty good reason. They helped us out quite a bit during WWII, with housing their royal family and liberating them from German rule in 1945. Due to that, we have developed a very good relationship with the Dutch. It’s easy to see why we have a such a good relationship with each other due to just that information alone. We even have a special work visa program for youth in both countries.

Because of all of this, I was curious about how exactly we helped out the country before and after we freed them from the Germans. The actual steps I found that were necessary for rehabilitating a country were lengthy and detailed.

First of all, we had to fight.

It’s no secret that over 7,000 Canadian lives were lost while liberating the Netherlands. Though many of the stories told of the Canadians coming in with big tanks, rolling into towns and saving them, that’s just the happy part of the story. There were thousands of lives lost before we could get to that point. A good example of this kind of fighting would be The Battle of the Scheldt. This was a task that was left mainly to the Canadians to accomplish, and we fought whole-heartedly for five weeks to chase the Germans away. In this battle, we lost over 12 thousand allied men, with over half of those men being Canadian soldiers. This battle, and other smaller ones like it, were incredibly important on the road to rehabilitating The Netherlands.

Although we didn’t go straight from those rough battles to heading in and freeing the people. After we won battles, we had to hold the land. It was months before we could say that the Germans weren’t just going to turn around and start fighting to get back into the area. We had to show that we weren’t going to forget how dangerous this was was just because we were starting to win, we kept our ground, cautious as ever. This was extremely important in ensuring the safety of ourselves and the civilians of those areas.

As soon as we decided to take action, the rest of it went by very quickly. We moved forward as quickly as possible and secured Northeastern Europe. As soon as we had done that, we had the land, and we were on our way to liberating the people and driving the Germans out.

This is when we finally began driving into towns and taking over. Although, this didn’t happen all at once. It was slow, it was steady, and it was still tough. But we were doing it, and that was what was making all the difference. This article has videos of Canadian Soldiers sharing their experiences with coming into the Netherlands. For years afterward, we would work with the Netherlands to help rebuild their communities, and they would honour us by burying our soldiers on their land and caring for their graves. To this day, the military graveyards are kept. This is a respect that could not be described in any other way than their actions.

It takes a lot to fight in a war, and even more to win one. Luckily, these countries that were directly affected had countries that were not come and help them, on the basis of human decency. These acts of kindness make the world go round and build mutual respect in countries that might otherwise not have a lot in common.

And to that, I saulte…uh..us all?