IJmuiden

Before IJmuiden was built, the area was known as Breesaap, a desolate plain where a handful of farming families strove to make a living.

Plans to connect Amsterdam with a canal to the North Sea, with its mouth in this area, had been drawn up already since 1626, but were only set into motion in the 19th century, when in 1851 the whole area was sold to the entrepreneurs Bik and Arnold. The first spade hit the ground on 8 April 1865.

IJmuiden is the newest city in North Holland. It was founded on 1 November 1876, when the North Sea Canal was officially opened by William III of the Netherlands, shortcutting Amsterdam's harbours' passage to the sea. He dubbed the town IJmuiden after passing the locks from the North Sea into the canal. After his ship, the paddle steamer Stad Breda built by the Stoomvaart Maatschappij Zeeland, passed, the first ship from Amsterdam, the SS Rembrandt built by the Royal Netherlands Steamship Company (KNSM), passed the other way.[3] The workers who dug the canal later settled there; they found work after the canal was finished in the fishing industry, but many also suffered extreme poverty.

IJmuiden, view to a street (town hall at the background)

The IJmuiden name literally means “mouth of the IJ”, which is a hint to the importance the town has for the Amsterdam harbour. The name first appeared, as IJ-muiden, in lines written in 1848 by the professor and journalist (and, later, a liberal finance minister in the Van Lynden van Sandenburg Cabinet) Simon Vissering. The present IJmuiden form was eventually adopted in 1876, as the North Sea Canal was being completed in this section.

In 1890 it had about 1,500 inhabitants, but boomed when the Koninklijke Nederlandse Hoogovens steelworks settled in IJmuiden in 1918. At that time shipping was at a low, because during World War I minesweepers laid mines nearby.[4] Also the canal mouth needed constant dredging due to the littoral drift in both directions on an open, sandy coast, due to winds blowing alternately from opposite quarters, sand accumulates in the sheltered angles outside the harbour between each converging breakwater and the shore.[5]

Still taken from a United States Army film, shot during the bombing of the German bunker Schnellbootbunker BY (SBB2), February 1945.[6]

After the German invasion of the Netherlands on 10 May 1940, the Dutch Royal family left the country from IJmuiden in the late evening of 12 May. Some were on board the British destroyer HMS Codrington, while Queen Wilhelmina left on board HMS Hereward. The quays at IJmuiden were crowded at that time with people desperate to be transported across the channel, sometimes at great expense. During the Nazi German occupation, the canal was out of operation and the Germans destroyed most of IJmuiden to create what they called Festung IJmuiden (literally "fortress", a heavily defended zone, from which the civilian population had been removed.

IJmuiden became the site of two separate fortified pens constructed by the German navy (Kriegsmarine) to house their schnellboote (fast torpedo boats, known to the Allies as E-boats)[7] and Biber midget submarines.[8] The older structure, codename Schnellbootbunker AY (SBB1), was protected by a 10-foot (3.0 m) thick concrete roof.[7] The newer one, codename Schnellbootbunker BY (SBB2), had 10–12 feet (3.0–3.7 m) of concrete, with a further 2–4-foot (0.6–1.2 m) layer separated by an air–gap.[lower-roman 1]

The E-boats laid up in the shelters during the day, safe from air–attack, and put to sea under cover of night to attack Allied shipping.[7] The pens were priority targets after D-day as the torpedo boats they protected were a great threat to the supply lines serving Allied forces. They were subjected to repeated air attack. This included four attacks by No. 9 Squadron and No. 617 Squadron of the Royal Air Force. These saw 53 five–ton, Tallboy earthquake bombs dropped.[9][10] There were also two attacks in 1945 by the American air force with rocket–powered Disney bombs, specialist weapons designed to penetrate fortified, concrete bunkers that could resist conventional bombs.

The story of IJmuiden during the war is told in the Bunker Museum IJmuiden (in Dutch). The city is also mentioned in Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl