May 1945: Operation Faust: Food transports from the ENKA site

Shortly after the liberation of Ede on 17 April 1945, the Allied advance stopped, while the western Netherlands remained occupied by German forces. Due to food and fuel shortages in the ‘Hunger Winter’ of 1944-1945, thousands of people had already died there, and this number was growing alarmingly, day by day. The Dutch government in London appealed urgently to the Allies for help.

On 25 April, the Allied commander-in-chief, the American General Eisenhower, gave the order to negotiate with the Germans to end this deadly famine.

On 28 April, the German and Allied authorities negotiated about food aid. On 30 April, the delegations met for a second time, in the Sint Jozef School in Achterveld. And so these meetings became known as the Achterveld Conference.

Even before an official agreement had been reached between the Germans and the Allies, a first flight of 242 British planes already began dropping food over the occupied territory on 29 April. This marked the start of Operation Manna. From 1 May, the Americans joined the operation with 400 aircraft; the name they gave to this operation was ‘Chowhound’. The food drops lasted for eight days.

But the greatest part of the food supplies needed to be transported by road from two Allied depots: this was Operation Faust. These depots were located in Nijmegen (Canadian) and in Ede (British); the British had stored large quantities of food at the ENKA site. Beginning on 2 May, 350 British and Canadian trucks transported the supplies from Ede and Nijmegen to a transhipment point between Wageningen and Grebbeberg hill. From this point on, the food was transported by 200 other trucks with civilian drivers via German-occupied Rhenen to the roughly 4 million hungry inhabitants of the Randstad region in the west of the Netherlands.

Operation Faust ended on 10 May. The famine was over, but by this point it had cost the lives of more than 20,000 Dutch people.

Do you want to experience this story on its original location? Visit the information panel on the ENKA site, between the bike path along the railway and the gatehouse of ENKA.