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.

Tessa Dunlop seeks the truth about tulip mania,

a bizarre tale of 17th-century bloom and bust.

It's said that trading in these nearly bankrupted the nation.

Adam Henson meets the big cheeses of the dairy world.

These are the breed of cattle

that are responsible for turning the British countryside black and white.

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.

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.

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 hi-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?

We're working our way up the Dutch coast.

This land's famous for being flat, with walls holding back the water.

Sea dykes are as Dutch as windmills, and a tale of doom

with one of those dykes turned a local lad into a legend.

I'm on his trail.

The Hero of Haarlem.

The town's honoured him with a statue.

And this is it - a boy with his finger in the dyke.

The schoolboy whose self-sacrifice saved his village.

It's as Dutch a story as you'll discover.

Or so you'd think!

This little boy was really made famous by an American author,

Mary Mapes Dodge, who included the story of the boy and the dyke

in her 19th-century book Hans Brinker Or The Silver Skates.

Mapes Dodge never even visited the Netherlands

but as her fictional tale caught on,

the locals erected a statue to satisfy curious fans.

The young Hero of Haarlem has been adopted by the Dutch

as an emblem of their struggle with the sea.

It's ironic that the story was imported here from the USA,

because the city's name, Haarlem, went the other way.

The neighbourhood of Harlem in Manhattan is a reminder that,

around 400 years ago, New York was called New Amsterdam,

part of the Dutch trading empire that reached New Zealand,

named after their province of Zeeland.

Today they celebrate their seafaring heritage.

It brought enormous wealth on the wind.

The golden age of sail saw the birth of global trade

and the city of Haarlem prospered.

Here coastal commerce fuelled a flower power revolution,

17th-century style.

It's a story of boom and bust that's brought historian Tessa Dunlop

to the most Dutch of Dutch industries.

Within sniffing distance of the sea, there's another ocean on this coast.

MUSIC: "Tulips From Amsterdam" by Max Bygraves

An ocean of tulips.

# When it's spring again I'll bring again

# Tulips from Amsterdam... #

You can't get much more Dutch than this. There's even a windmill.

Well, sort of!

Most of Britain's tulips start life in Dutch soil.

In April and May, the northern coast of the Netherlands blossoms.

A carpet of colour.

Carlos van Der Veek's family's

been growing bulbs on this shore for years.

Why is it that tulips grow so well here in Holland especially?

It's mainly because of the climate.

The sea brings in his influence,

the springs are cool, the winters are mild,

and that's ideal for tulips.

Sadly, these beautiful blooms will never brighten someone's birthday.

Their heads are lopped off.

These tulips are grown for the bulb, not the bloom.

The flowers become mulch to feed a billion-pound bulb industry.

So tulip bulbs today have a value

but four centuries ago, it seems they were almost priceless.

It's said that trading in these nearly bankrupted the nation.

Turn back the pages of history to the early 17th century

and the tulip, a wild flower from Asia,

had recently arrived in Europe.

MUSIC: "Tiptoe Through The Tulips" by Tiny Tim

Rich merchants wanted them at any price.

Dutch dealers went so bananas for bulbs,

they were portrayed as greedy monkeys.

It became known as Tulip Mania.

The story goes that, when the price of the bulbs crashed,

so did the economy.

Markets that outgrow common sense are familiar now,

but does this tale of bloom and bust stand up?

I want to find out the real truth behind Tulip Mania.

Historian Anne Goldgar has spent years studying Tulip Mania,

using original 17th-century sources.

Why, Anne, did Holland of all places become tulip country?

Because they had access, first of all, to them

because of the fact the Netherlands was a very important trading nation,

and there were a lot of people interested in collecting exotica.

People in the 17th century wanted to have tulips

which were striped or speckled,

and you can see that in this tulip catalogue, which was made in 1637.

So this is rather like having, I don't know, the right diamond today?

Yes, absolutely.

This 17th-century floral bling was prized for its rarity.

Tulips are tricky to grow. It takes seven years from a seed.

In the time of Tulip Mania, bulb farming was a bit of a lottery,

a gamble that Dutch traders hoped would win them a jackpot.

Four centuries after Tulip Mania, traders are still tense.

In the 17th century, bulbs were bought in a frenzy,

betting they'd go up in value before they were out of the ground.

The market did boom out of control.

Single bulbs went for the price of a grand house.

But did the bust nearly bankrupt the nation?

They come to a head on 7th of February 1637.

At that point, someone says, "I have a bulb to sell,"

and nobody bought it in Haarlem. At that point people started to worry

and prices did fall dramatically, that is true.

As for bankruptcies,

I have found no-one who went bankrupt from Tulip Mania.

At the port of Harlingen,

farmer Adam Henson has crossed the North Sea.

He's in search of the origin of some familiar faces.

These beauties remind me of home.

A staggering nine out of ten of all British dairy cows

can trace their ancestry back to these lovely Friesland ladies.

These are the breed of cattle that are responsible

for turning the British countryside black and white.

To find out what makes this landscape ideal for rearing cows,

I really need to take a step back in time.

Distinctive round mounds are dotted all around the Friesian coast.

2,500 years ago, this part of the Netherlands was marshland

and regularly flooded by the sea.

So the locals came up with a bright idea -

build their own little hills, high ground above the flood.

These little man-made refuges stood proud over a landscape often under the sea.

That constant washing of the land left a legacy in the soil.

These are the amazing grasslands of Friesland,

but why are they so amazing?

Well, for a comparison I've brought some of my soil from home.

My farm is on the top of the Cotswolds, 1,000ft above sea level.

The soil is called Cotswold Brash.

It's full of stone and doesn't really retain moisture.

Therefore it grows pretty poor grass.

Now, in comparison, take a look at this stuff.

This is alluvial sea clay.

It's full of minerals that come from the sea,

and those minerals help produce fantastic grass.

The grass is full of sugar and protein that the cows love,

and that converts into energy and helps them produce masses of milk.

Gallons of the white stuff.

Their diet of nutritious coastal grass

helps make these ladies world beaters.

MUSIC: "All Blues" by Miles Davis

But for a long while, the world wasn't that mad about milk.

As a drink, milk straight from the cow

had been considered beyond the pale, unfit for human consumption.

But Louis Pasteur's revolutionary heat treatment in 1864 changed everything.

Pasteurised milk was now touted as a health drink,

a source of vitamins and calcium city-dwellers desperately needed.

The new industrial world wanted milk.

To muscle in on the market, the farmers of Friesland

began selective breeding of their "super milkers".

Those Friesian pioneers produced a cow with a higher yield

and higher visibility.

They bred a black-and-white brand to be instantly recognisable.

Marleen Felius is an artist and cow historian.

-Marleen, Hi.

-Hi.

It's not that old, you know.

The Friesian breed, everybody says it's centuries old. That's not true.

-As a breed it started only late in the 19th century.

-Right.

Yeah, before that they had good cows but it was not a breed

because people didn't breed yet.

The cattle from the 19th century were looking different

than from the 17th century and then they became more black and white.

Next time you buy some milk in the supermarket

or drive past black-and-white cows,

spare a thought for this part of the Netherlands' coast

and their beautiful Friesian cows,

that have contributed so much to the worldwide production of milk.

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.

Here, they've encouraged nature to do its own thing.

Very few people are allowed to set foot on remote Rottumerplaat.

But Miranda's been given permission to look for signs of life.

This is the sort of spot that seems to sum up

"getting away from it all".

But as you walk across the dunes,

there's more than sand beneath your feet.

Concrete!

Loads of it.

Yes, you've guessed it, like much of the Dutch coast,

this island was built by the Dutch,

or at least started by them.

You can still see the line of a sea wall

built in the 1950s to trap shifting sands.

The island was encouraged to grow

as part of another land reclamation scheme.

But there's no-one here.

By the 1990s, wilderness proved more desirable than new living space.

Rottumerplaat was abandoned to nature.

Oystercatchers, spoonbills and common terns are amongst the birds

feeding on the mudflats, rich in shellfish.

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: "Van Der Valk" Theme

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.

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 2011