Operation Chowhound, May 1, 1945

A salute to Ted, the WWII Army Air Forces Veteran who kindly told me the story behind this yesterday.

On May 1, 1945, a week before the end of the War in Europe, the people of Amsterdam were starving. Amazingly, a truce was arranged with the Germans for an air drop of food into the city by the US 8th Air Force.

But this was a WWII scale air drop: 400 of the big 4 engine bombers, which had just been busy dropping 3 ton loads of explosives each on cities like Berlin, were now sent in to drop flour, Swiss bread, and chocolate. These aircraft normally flew well over 25,000 feet, and came in, with full flaps and as slow as possible to indicate a mission of mercy, at the absurd altitude of 400 feet, close enough to see the German anti-aircraft gunners standing still by their guns. Had the Germans fired, the carnage to the American bombers would have been beyond description; had the mission been the bombing mission these planes had been on the previous days, Amsterdam would be wiped out.

The Dutch gathered in the street by the thousands, waiting.

Inside the B-17 " Snell's Snails," the crew couldn't resist. They opened a giant box of chocolate and took a few bites. It was, Ted told, fantastic. But these air warriors, taking an odd break from deadly conflict and months of mass destructive bombing, gathered their wits, agreed the chocolate was meant for the Dutch, and packaged it up again for the drop, a few nibbles shy.

The mission continued over the week. In a sweet parody of the problem of having to physically kick a live bomb out of the bomb bay, the doors open to the sky when it "hung up," Ted had to leave his station at the tail gun to help kick the boxes of chocolate to fall on Holland.

When they fell, the food sometimes skipped dangerously near people; a 50 pound sack of flour is pretty lethal if it falls on your head. Sometimes the packages hit smack into muck and stuck there. People rushed for the food.

Decades later, he visited a small shop in Amsterdam, and told this story; the fellow brought his mother out and she beamed with delight- she had been there that day; the Swiss bread was the best she ever had.

A distinction here is not only the massive scale of the Operation - four hundred aircraft, but the immediate re-purposing of the bombers and crews; yesterday killing and destroying, today feeding. Commonly, 6-8% of B-17s and B-24s were lost every mission. Flying with total vulnerability into a Nazi truce in Operation Chowhound, 4000 American flyers took as great a risk doing this as in any raid, maybe greater.

An excellent set of photos and documents related to this mission.