Why did Baronness Ella van Heemstra (the mother of Audrey Hepburn) wholeheartedly believe London would easily get destroyed by the Nazi air bombings and the British doomed to defeat (which led her to transferring Audrey from London to Arnhem)? : r/WorldWarTwo Skip to main content

Get the Reddit app

Scan this QR code to download the app now
Or check it out in the app stores

Why did Baronness Ella van Heemstra (the mother of Audrey Hepburn) wholeheartedly believe London would easily get destroyed by the Nazi air bombings and the British doomed to defeat (which led her to transferring Audrey from London to Arnhem)?

I was just reading how near the end of 1944 and early 1945, the very tiny reinforcement sent to the Pacific by the Royal Navy to aid the American war effort against Japan consisting of no more than three fleets.............. And despite their tiny numbers, one of these fleets were able to demolish Japanese air carriers in multiple battles despite the Imperial Japan's Navy still having a surprisingly big number of ships during this time period..... Led to me to digging into a rabbit hole......

And I learned that not only did the Nazis never have a modern navy other than submarines, they never built a single aircraft carrier. And the Royal Navy would be scoring an unending streaks of destroying large numbers of German vessels..... Because they had aircraft carriers to send planes to bomb them during the exchange of heavy bombings between ships. Not just that, the Royal Navy even stopped the Nazi advancements because they destroyed newly Luftwaffe bases across Europe especially in the Mediterranean sea with their air carrier raids.......

This all leads me to the question. What was Ella Van Heemstra thinking when she believed Audrey would be safe in Netherlands as opposed to being in the Britain because she believed that the Luftwaffe would destroy all of England's cities to complete rubble? Even without the benefit of hindsight about the Royal Airforce handily beating the Luftwaffe despite being outnumbered and at so big a loss that it took at least a full year for Nazi Germany to build planes and train pilots to replace those lost from the Battle of Britain thus hampering their movements across Europe, one would just have to compare the state of the Kriegsmarine before the war prior to losses at Norway and the Royal Navy to see that somethings amiss..... The lack of aircraft carriers at all in the German armed forces while the British military already had several modern aircraft carriers in 1939 before war was declared and production suddenly ramped last minute. To see that just by their Navy alone, the UK was already strong enough to fend off the Luftwaffe. And remember in the Battle of Britain it was pretty much the Royal Airforce doing the bulk of the fighting and very little planes from the Royal Navy and the British army was involved in the main dogfighting space of the battle. Which should give you an idea of how much planes already pre-built the UK had before the Battle of France (plus the Brits actually lost plenty of planes in France because they bombed them to prevent them from falling to German hands!).

So why? Why did Heemstra think a nation so powerful as the UK would be a pushover that'd only take a few bombed cities to surrender? How can she sincerely believed the Nazi war machine could casually destroy all traces of London with a few bombing runs and ignore the Royal Navy on top of the Royal Airforce and British Army which had some of the most advanced aviation technology in the world along with some very high quality pilots? Wsa she not paying attention in Poland, Norway, and France of the relative underperformance the Luftwaff was doing and how even stuff like simple weather prevented German air support from helping through much of the operations in some of these fronts such as Norway? Didn't she see the production rates of planes in London and France VS Germany in the months before the war which didn't have a landslide disparity (with France even outproducing Germany during some intervals and in some areas)?

Really what was Audrey's mother thinking in taking her to Netherlands and in seeing London and other major cities guaranteed to be demolished out of existence and even the notion that UK was doomed to lose the war?!

Share
Thinking Snoo

Be the first to comment

Nobody's responded to this post yet.
Add your thoughts and get the conversation going.