The Netherlands Coast

We're in the Netherlands.

A fortified shore.

This is the frontline of a conflict with the sea.

For centuries the Dutch have battled to build a coastline like no other.

A wind-powered landscape,

lined with a carpet of colourful blooms

and extraordinary constructions that Mark is exploring.

This is what the Dutch came up with.

A 19-mile-long sea wall.

And I'm on a peaceful isle, said to be the site

of the last battle of the Second World War in Europe,

to explore a tale of terror and traitors!

They are Indian, people from India, but wearing German uniforms.

They were caught in North Africa and they ran over to the Germans.

This is Coast...and beyond.

The Netherlands may be brand-new territory for Coast,

but it seems rather familiar to me.

There's something strangely unreal about these flat landscapes,

borrowed from the sea

and compressed by this enormous sky.

It reminds me of where I grew up in Norfolk.

We share the North Sea with the Netherlands.

So we're being nosey neighbours -

going Dutch to see what we might copy

to make the most of our own coast.

They don't just live beside the sea here, they live under it.

A third of Dutch homes are below sea level.

Huge banks hold the water back.

They rearrange their coast to suit themselves.

Channel the sea, harness the winds,

build mega-ports.

The Dutch are old masters at making new land from the waves.

We've such sights to see, on a shore full or surprises!

Our journey will take us to the border with Germany

and the island of Rottumerplaat,

the coast cutting into the heart of the Netherlands.

But we start at the small coastal town of Ouwerkerk.

This is the province of Zeeland, "Sea-land".

We share this sea with the Dutch, for better or worse.

In 1953, the east coast of Britain was battered by a terrifying storm.

307 Britons died,

and over 30,000 were forced to flee as the North Sea rushed in.

Here, on the Dutch lowlands, the devastation was even worse.

The '53 flood was a national catastrophe.

NEWSREEL: Never in living memory have the Dutch suffered such a disaster.

The seas, lashed by a mighty wind, broke through the dykes

and poured in to swamp the countryside.

The flood left 1,800 dead and many more homeless.

The tragedy renewed an age-old conflict with the sea

that the Dutch are still fighting, 60 years on.

School trips teach the next generation to take up the struggle.

SHE SPEAKS DUTCH

At this memorial to the flood victims,

they hear from those who fought for their lives.

SHE SPEAKS DUTCH

Mina Verton was the same age as these children

the night the waters came.

In 1953, her family were caught up in a desperate race against time,

as water sped towards their home.

With little warning of the deluge, they were trapped.

What happened to you on the night of the flood?

NEWSREEL: Aircraft fly in supplies for the people still to be moved.

British, American and Belgian pilots keep up a shuttle service

in helicopters, to relieve the many isolated villages

cut off from contact with the areas of safety.

I've got a map here which shows the parts of the Netherlands

hit by the 1953 disaster.

All parts in green were under water,

and it's shocking to see how much of the delta was affected.

Through the green you can see entire road networks, villages.

In just six hours, 700 square miles were completely submerged.

Because much of the Netherlands is below sea level,

when the protective walls failed in 1953,

the impact was worse here than in Britain.

So for 40 years, the Dutch beavered away,

spending billions on high-tech schemes,

ringing their coast in concrete and rock defences.

At its heart, with 62 floodgates, the mighty Oosterscheldedam,

one of the engineering wonders of the world.

But it could be just ten years before the low-lying Netherlands

need a new plan, as sea levels rise.

We share the same threat.

Will our shore one day share fortifications

on the same massive scale?

Although we often say "Holland",

the Netherlands has 12 different provinces.

Only two are actually called Holland.

In the south is the resort of Scheveningen.

Given Holland's watery history, something odd is happening here.

People are on the beach, enjoying themselves.

There's a watchful eye kept on the approaching waves.

But the Dutch don't hide behind their sea walls.

Miranda's come to find out

what Netherlanders like to do beside the sea.

Sea bathing started here around 200 years ago,

about the time it was really taking off in Brighton,

and this is a photograph of this resort some years later.

In fact, it could be Brighton,

apart from these extraordinary wicker chairs on the beach.

Like our early resorts,

Scheveningen started as an exclusive retreat for the rich.

But, in the late 19th century, the tourist trade developed.

In 1885 this grand hotel, The Kurhaus, was opened,

nearly ten years before the Blackpool Tower was built.

So, what are we looking at?

The Dutch version of Blackpool?

Or perhaps it's Brighton below the sea.

Or maybe something else altogether. I need a local guide to the locals.

Philip. Hi, Miranda. Nice to meet you.

Philip Walkate is a keen observer of the Dutch at their leisure.

We work hard, we enjoy partying.

On a nice summer day,

when this is packed, everybody will have their own square metre of sand.

Very organised, very structured.

Yes, because there's not a lot of space,

and half the country will go to the beach on a nice day.

So this is mine, that's yours,

we'll be fine together as long as we don't get involved with each other.

-Quite like a class system, would you say?

-We have class system as well.

-And we're in the right part of the beach for your class now.

-Oh, good, thank you!

The posh people go over there and this is where partying goes on.

I'm curious.

Do the Dutch share any of our seaside traditions,

like building sandcastles?

This a sandcastle extraordinaire, isn't it?

-I made this this morning for you.

-I don't think so!

This is incredible! We'd never see something like this in England.

It represents things you can do in the water.

This big guy here sunbathing. Was that modelled on you?

The Mayor of Amsterdam. This is all he does, just lying in the sun.

No day out at the seaside's complete without a snack.

Phillip's promised me a real Dutch delight.

This is raw herring.

Wow, is he just gutting it?

Cutting and gutting it, taking off the head,

you leave the tail, cos you use that to eat it.

Not all at once!

Mmm, amazing!

It's like the best sushi ever.

Is this a good time of year to eat it this? Is it a seasonal product?

Yes, this is actually the new Dutch herring,

-the fatter it is, everybody gets more excited.

-It's very good.

The fat Dutch herring is much more than a delicacy. It's a celebrity.

Every July, the first catch is celebrated with a festival.

Washed down with lashings of the potent local tipple.

I'll pour you some Dutch Gin. Jenever, it's like a schnapps.

I've got to drink this as well as this. It's only ten in the morning.

Yeah, you can just take a sip. You can, like, knock it up

or you can just take a sip. You want to knock it up?

Why not?

Wow.

'I'm beginning to see what draws the Dutch back to the beach.'

I could do this all day.

In a land where the people guard their coastline closely,

here, at least, the Dutch take time out from hostilities with the sea.

The locals have ingenious solutions for living in their "Waterworld".

Tunnelling under it.

Floating on it.

And draining it dry.

And sometimes, just rising above it all.

MUSIC: "Jump Around" by House Of Pain

It took off 500 years ago.

The Dutch wanted to get about without getting their feet wet.

Now it's an international sport.

It's called Fierljeppen - far leaping.

Who leaps farthest, wins.

I'm Jaco de Groot.

I'm Dymphie van Rooijen.

She's running as fast as possible. Come on - run faster, faster!

Run and climb up, hup, go, go, go, yeah, good!

Climb on! Wow!

I can't climb faster!

The water, it's two metres deep.

Nae! Help!

And, yes, it's very cold.

Oh!

The pole is standing in the water, so we run about 30 km an hour.

And then you run to a pole standing still, and then you have to grab it.

DYMPHIE SHOUTS ENCOURAGEMENT

And you have to climb it in five seconds.

-It's just like you fly.

-Yeah.

Dutch engineers have carved out a remarkable coastline.

They've battled with the sea.

And they've taken command of it, in a big way.

The North Sea Canal.

A corridor of water carrying the coast inland,

taking us to the heart of the Netherlands,

and the capital, Amsterdam.

But this channelling of the waves

pales in comparison with another Dutch creation.

At the end of the North Sea Canal is Flevoland.

60 years ago, all this land was underwater.

This is where the Dutch got their own back on the sea.

Mark is searching for clues to this land's sunken past.

I'm on the hunt for a medieval ship that's somewhere in those meadows.

Miles from the sea,

they're digging up the timbers of a medieval shipwreck

in the middle of a field!

But it's not the boat that's out of place,

it's us!

Now, we're ten miles from the sea,

but only 80 years ago, this was the sea bed.

This landlocked shipwreck is just one of hundreds

discovered after a huge area was reclaimed from the sea.

The sheer scale of this land grab was staggering.

For centuries,

the sea regularly flooded the heart of the Netherlands.

But in the early 20th century, the Dutch fought back.

Stage one was to build a huge sea wall across the mouth of the inlet.

Work started in 1927

and was completed five years later.

It was one of the greatest engineering projects...

in an age of innovation.

And this is it.

The 19-mile-long Afsluitdijk.

The name means "closing off dyke".

Over there is the North Sea, that's salt water.

And the line of the coast is defined by a motorway.

On one side the sea and on the other a lake!

This concrete causeway became a new stretch of the Netherlands' coastline.

With the concrete dyke holding back the sea,

safe behind their defences,

they started to pump out salt water, to reclaim the land.

Legions of men, armed for the task, were drafted in.

Barracks were built to house them.

And to drain the small ocean behind their new sea wall,

they used pumping stations.

The Dutch make it look so easy but how does it work?

-Hi.

-Hi, Mark.

Rombout Jongejans is a reclamation expert.

First of all you start with building an island.

Right.

On this island you build a pumping station.

In the old days we did it with windmill.

For this model I'll show you with the electricity.

So here we have a model of a pump.

At the same time, you start building a dyke.

-So you build the island first and then the wall.

-Yeah.

Then we start...

Wa-hey! There it goes!

So you're pumping now the water from the new land to the sea.

So the water goes up here, and down on that side.

When we reclaim land in Britain,

we fill the land up above sea level but you do it the other way around.

Yeah, we do the other way round.

And after, when the land is dry, you fly over with an aeroplane

and put in seeds of wheat, which grows,

and uses quite a lot of water, and gives structure to the ground.

And presumably there's water constantly filtering back through?

Yes, that's why you still have to be pumping.

You can see that the dyke's a bit insecure.

Yeah, yeah, OK, this is just a model, eh?

In 40 years of pumping and digging,

the Dutch recovered an area the size of greater London.

And now they could populate it.

The 1960s saw a mass migration within the Netherlands.

Families were encouraged to set up home on the old seabed.

Wherever the Dutch encountered obstacles pumping out the land,

they worked around them.

Shokland, once an island adrift in the sea,

was now swallowed up by land...

..its old shoreline traced out by trees.

But they couldn't manage to pump all the water

out of an area called the Oostvaardersplassen.

So now it's one of Europe's largest wetland nature reserves.

A wild corner on a tamed coast.

Neat, unnaturally straight lines rule on this man-made shore.

There's a hard edge to the heart of the Netherlands.

I've reached the mid-point of my journey at Lelystad.

A young city born out of the waves,

it harbours a reminder of an older age...

..when the Dutch began building boats to build an empire.

This is an exact copy of a 17th-century original.

The Batavia was launched in 1628,

not to do battle, but to do business.

This ship was part of the Dutch East India Company -

an organisation so vast,

it's been called the first multi-national corporation.

Craft like this carried spices from Asia.

They made the Dutch East India Company very wealthy indeed.

Success set the Netherlands on a collision course

with neighbours across the North Sea - the English.

I've got a copy of a painting here.

It shows a daring raid in 1667 by the Dutch on the English Navy.

The English ships are on fire.

All this happened just outside London. Pretty cheeky.

That naval humiliation was one of many in the Anglo-Dutch wars

that rumbled on throughout the 17th century.

Wars that the Dutch won.

So how did they beat the Royal Navy?

Did the secret lie in their ships?

They're building one here to find out.

It's the baby of Aryan Klein.

This is a 17th-century Admiralty ship

and she was specifically designed to wage war at sea against the English.

What was the difference between the Dutch maritime power and English maritime power?

We were geared up for ship-building in a huge way,

so we could produce ships at quite a fast rate.

So you could mass-produce ships like this.

Almost mass-produce - a ship like this would be ready within a year.

How could the Dutch build a ship in just a year

when the English couldn't?

What was the key to this mass-production?

MUSIC: Theme to "Camberwick Green"

Windmills - lots of them!

Before steam power, there was wind power.

If you can use a mill to pump water and to grind wheat,

why not use it to saw wood as well?

During the Netherlands' golden age of sail,

hundreds of windmills fed the shipbuilding industry

with a production line of cut wood,

enabling mass-production of ships

almost a century before the Industrial Revolution.

The Wadden Islands, on the north-west coast of the Netherlands.

Peaceful and unspoilt.

But one island here conceals the scars of a terrible battle.

In the Second World War, the Netherlands and much of Europe

were under Nazi occupation.

The tiny island of Texel seemed an insignificant dot.

But this out-of-the-way place saw an eruption of violence

in the dying days of the conflict.

It's been called the last battle of the Second World War in Europe.

But it all started so differently.

The Germans had taken the island in 1940, almost unopposed.

Before long, they'd made themselves at home.

Two years into the war, this curious sort of occupation got...

..curiouser.

Look at these photos. They were taken here on Texel

and they show local children posing with Indian soldiers.

But they're not prisoners of war.

If you look carefully, you can see they're wearing German uniforms.

These soldiers of the British Empire were part of the Nazi army.

Why where the Indians here, thousands of miles from home,

fighting for the enemy?

To make sense of Texel's strange war, I'm meeting two locals.

Cor Kievits and Riet Van Der Vis-Bremer

were teenagers when the Nazis came.

The German soldiers in these photographs

seem to be treating Texel like a holiday camp.

That's what Texel was for. They had people who had been at the front

and they were completely knocked out.

They brought them here for a couple of months to regain strength.

What can you both tell me about this very curious photograph,

with what seem to be Indian soldiers surrounded by Dutch children?

The children were surprised by the dark colour of the people.

They had never seen it before.

Yes, we never see that, that people.

They were caught in the North of Africa

and they ran over to the Germans.

These men were part of a remarkable Nazi project.

The Germans persuaded captured troops

with a grudge against the Allies to switch sides.

Some Indians from the Allied army in North Africa

were recruited by the Germans to form an extraordinary Indian Legion.

A propaganda victory for the Nazis

but it didn't impress their generals.

Not trusted to fight,

the Indian Legion was put to work on coastal defences.

Their stay on Texel was brief.

But the island's curious connections to foreign fighters didn't stop there.

It's so strange to find a hammer and sickle,

emblem of the Soviet Union,

here in a Dutch cemetery.

But it's Soviet soldiers who are buried here.

Like the Indian troops before them,

they'd come to Texel as part of the German army.

Originally from the Soviet province of Georgia,

these were battle-hardened veterans of the Eastern Front.

Tough and independently-minded,

Georgians had little love for their Russian commanders.

So, when captured, some collaborated with the Germans.

They arrived on Texel in early 1945.

As the Georgians posed for pictures with the locals,

the Allied armies were advancing across Europe.

NEWSREEL: And a mighty thrust into the heart of Germany began on the beaches of Normandy.

Some nine months after D-day,

Texel and much of the northern Netherlands

still remained under Nazi control.

But the German army was being forced back

on the Western and Eastern front.

By April 1945, the Germans were in desperate straits.

The Red Army was massing for a final assault on Berlin.

On Texel, the Georgians, once soldiers in the Soviet Army,

were ordered by the Germans to head to the front line

to fight the Allies.

Having found themselves on the losing side,

the Georgians had one desperate chance to redeem themselves.

Texel had survived almost five years of war

without a shot fired in anger.

That all changed in the early hours of 6th April, 1945.

You see the bullet hole in the wall there? Over there?

The Georgians turned on the Germans.

At one o'clock they started to kill the Germans

and they cut their throats

and they put hand grenades in their rooms with them

and they shot them.

Anyway, they killed all the Germans that lived among them,

-any place where they were.

-How many was that?

-I think about 500.

-Good heavens!

500 massacred in one night.

The battle was later dramatised in this Soviet feature film.

Locals caught in the crossfire couldn't tell friend from foe.

Both sides wore the same uniforms.

I looked around the corner and I saw behind a tree,

what I saw, two Georgians.

One of them pointed the flame-thrower at us

and I said, "Christ, they're bloody Germans."

German reinforcements flooded the island.

The Georgians, who'd been fighting for control of Texel,

were now fighting for their lives.

Surrender wasn't an option.

The rebels made for the island's most secure stronghold.

One group of Georgians took a last stand here at the lighthouse.

Apparently it still carries the scars of the fighting.

A new wall conceals the pock-marks of a desperate battle.

Mere bullets were never going to go through a wall this thick.

It was an impregnable defensive position

but it was also a death-trap

and all the Georgians in here were eventually killed

when the Germans blew in the door on the ground floor.

The killing continued for a month on the tiny isle of Texel.

Then, in Berlin, Hitler committed suicide.

BELLS PEAL

On 7th May 1945, Germany surrendered.

Europe celebrated peace.

But in Texel, once famous for its tranquillity,

the fighting continued.

The Germans wouldn't surrender to the Georgians.

It was two weeks after the Second World War in Europe ended,

before Allied troops arrived to finish the final battle - here on Texel.

Of the 800 Georgians who came to the island, only 200 or so survived.

They had worn the uniform of the hated enemy.

But their remarkable uprising guaranteed their safe passage.

The rebels returned home, as heroes of the Soviet Union.

The sandy isles of the Northern Netherlands.

They subtly alter their shape with each new tide.

It's one battle between land and sea

the Dutch have decided to stay out of.

The sweeping sand flats make for lovely, relaxed walking,

but getting between the islands isn't so easy.

All this sand makes it impossible to get a boat in here.

But the Dutch have come up with a typically ingenious idea.

Take the bus to your boat.

This truck is known as the Vliehors Express,

and it's one of the ways to get from island to island.

MUSIC: "Eye Level" by The Simon Park Orchestra ("Van Der Valk" Theme)

PASSENGERS SING

This bus ride gets more and more otherworldly.

We've just stopped at a driftwood stockade

in the middle of this sand desert.

Looks like an art installation.

Even in this natural paradise

the Dutch can't stop reclaiming stuff from the sea.

Wonderful! It's a museum of found objects -

fish crates, computer monitors,

buoys, lifebelts, signs.

This unusual bus journey has a suitably unlikely bus stop.

This peculiar walkway is actually a jetty.

At the far end, the water is deep enough for a ferry.

Sand and sea together, combining to conjure up something truly special.

It's a delightfully Dutch conundrum that sums up our journey.

Life on the margins between sea and shore

can create a flair and resourcefulness that will rise above any challenge.

The Dutch have learned to live with the sea,

to recognise its opportunities and to meet its threats.

As sea levels rise

and the search for novel solutions becomes more urgent,

I reckon we can all learn a thing or two from the Netherlands.

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd