Between the devil and the deep blue sea - University of Canterbury

- 300 -
survival - they simply were not strong enough. Instead, High Command relied on the
expectation that a campaign in the Netherlands would be peripheral, and in that case, hoped
that improving and enlarging its Anny would increase its deterrence value, thereby
discouraging potential invaders. To this end, High Command maximised one major
advantage of the war situation: the combatants fought on many fronts and could not
concentrate all their might in one direction. In the words of one Dutch historian,
the importance of the Dutch anned forces was such in 1914 that, if we had been
involved in the conflict, they [the troops] would have accounted for more than
the difference in strength [krachtsverschil] between the warring great powers 4
(italics in original)
It was the aim of High Command to protect the Netherlands' situation of upholding the
difference in troop strength (krachtsverschil) between the two warring sides. But it proved
to be an impossible obj ective. By 1918, the comparative strength of the Dutch Anlly and
Navy in relation to that of the belligerents had fallen well below the 1914 standard. 5
The quality and quantity of two vital weapons employed on the Westem Front,
namely the machine-gun and artillery piece, illustrate how rapidly the defensive capabilities
of the Dutch Anny declined. Of the 780 machine-guns in the Netherlands in August 1914,
only 156 met the requirements of a modem land force. 6 Yet, at the outbreak of war, the
Anny was operating similar numbers per soldier as the belligerents: for example, the one
gun to 256 Dutch troops (1 :256) ratio was much better than the 1 :625 ratio in the French
Anny, although nothing like as good as the 1: 100 allocation in the British Expeditionary
Force. 7 By 1918, Britain was operating four times as many machine-guns per battalion as it
had in 1914, while Germany increased its numbers from 24 to 358 per division. France had
the most staggering expansion of all, rising from a mere 2,158 in front-line service in
September 1914 to 66,000 by the end of the war. 8 By comparison, in 1918, the Netherlands'
4 "De beteekenis van de Nederlandsche Weermacht in 1914 was van dien aard, dat, indien wij in het conflict
betrokken waren geweest, zelfs meer dan het krachtsverschil tusschen de oorlogvoerende grootmachten zou zijn
gebonden." (italics in original) (Uijterschout, Beknopt Overzicht p. 12).
5 For which, see: Chapter 3, pp. 125 - 128.
6 Bosboom, In Moeilijke Omstandigheden p. 32.
7 Figures obtained by dividing the approximate number of soldiers per French division (15,000) by the number of
machine-guns per division (24), and dividing the number of soldiers per British Expeditionary Force battalion
(around 1,000) by the number of machine-guns per battalion (around 10), in Haythornthwaite, The World War Olle
Source Bookpp. 71, 174,219.
8 Ibid. pp. 71,180,195.