WWII Pilot Recounts Venlo Bombing 80 Years Later: A Story of Survival and Loss

Almost eighty years after the Second World War, Dutch pilot André Hissink still shuddered when he thought back to the bombing of the Maas bridges near Venlo in 1944. “They were so difficult. We didn’t want to go there.”

He imagines himself back in his cockpit when he talks about his flights. “It was the hardest town I remember. Left, bomb, go.”

Hissink tells his story shortly before his death and the podcast Friendly bombs. A podcast with NOS presenter Rob Trip about the often unknown stories of Allied bombing in the Second World War. Thousands and thousands of people died in places like Doetinchem, Eindhoven, Breskens, Huissen, Amsterdam, Westkapelle, Den Helder, The Hague and so also in Venlo.

Hissink is 103.5 years old – he puts a lot of emphasis on those six months – when he tells his story from Canada, his second home country. Around 900 Dutch people were employed by the Royal Air Force as pilots or technicians on the ground. Hissink was the last Dutch RAF pilot who could still tell his story.

After fleeing Holland at the start of the war, Hissink trained as a pilot because he felt it was his duty to help liberate Europe. He made 69 bombing flights.

For him, targets in the Netherlands were very different from bombing raids over France or Germany. “Then you sit in front of your own country and you think: these are our people down there. We don’t want to harm them. You have to aim and drop those bombs as best you can.”

He had several trips to go to Venlo, to the railway and the road bridge over the Maas. German soldiers had surrounded themselves around the bridge. They wanted to control the bridge to get equipment and men from Germany to Holland. The Allies wanted to prevent this.

“Tough goal. And the Krauts knew that too,” said Hissink.

Many of the bombs did not hit the bridges, but Venlo itself, perhaps also André Hissink’s. The Seuren family lived in the center of town, near the Maas, in the autumn of 1944. For the podcast, Rob Trip visited the youngest son of the family.

Paul Seuren is the only child of the family who survived the bombing. Six brothers and sisters died instantly. Paul, a baby less than six months old, was found with his mother.

“I was still in her arms and she was lying with me on the rubble. I heard that later from a neighbor. She even saw that my mother was lying there with me.”

She died two days later from her injuries. “She never knew the six children were dead.”

More than 200 people died in Venlo that fall in 1944 due to the bombs. The city was destroyed. The consequences can still be seen, just like in other cities: lots of new construction alternating with old buildings.

In the podcast, Rob Trip also addresses the question of whether the victims of the bombings blame the Allies. Eighty years after the bombings, Paul Seuren is very determined. “No,” he says. He says that the pilots had an impossible task: these bridges could not be hit from such a height with so many anti-aircraft guns.

“I was never angry about that. How do they say that today? We were collateral damagecollateral damage.”