Pondering Polder

[GeorgeBates]

That is correct.

I referred to Irrigation Ditches for the sole reason that this is the designation of an existing ASL Terrain (Q1 Pegasus Bridge), that comes closest among existing ASL terrains to polder drainages - yet would need some tweaking to capture the polder characteristics.

Note, that the width of polder drainages can vary, ranging from ditches to channels.

Someone has asked for their depth. Alas, I do not know. A quick casual search in the net has not turned up anything useful. Some Dutch ASLers would likely know, I suppose.

von Marwitz

I have some rules for drainage ditches coming up in a Malaya Historical Study. Happy to share the text if anyone is looking for ideas.

 

[Tuomo]

yet would need some tweaking to capture the polder characteristics.

WHICH IS WHAT?

And yes, they're for drainage, not irrigation. I get it. One's a ditch filled with water and the other's......

 

[ASLSARGE]

The land between the dikes and ditches is extremely water-soaked, and muddy just below the surface. Serious vehicle Bog terrain. Being of Dutch ancestry, I've done a few Holland scenario designs using the Polder. +3 DRM to the Bog Check DR in each Polder hex travelled. Makes you realize how critical staying on the roads was...and one of the main reasons "A Bridge Too Far" failed.

 

[von Marwitz]

WHICH IS WHAT?

The Oberst has not yet observed your delivery of a cask of champagne to inspire his thoughts!?

Here are some things that come to mind:

• Bog Checks: What DRM's under what weather conditions?
• Depth of the drainages: As stated, I do not know how deep these are, but depending on the depth would be the difficulty/impossibility of crossing them with Infantry and various types of vehicles.
• Width of drainages: If you have something akin to a ditch it is all the difference to something like a channel. But various widths do occur in polders. Dependent on this would be the difficulty/impossibility of crossing them same with regard to depth of the drainages.
• Are you seeking to design "generic" polders or polders keyed to a specific area (as for a HASL): If you want to design rules for generic polders, then you would have to cover mechanics for various widths and depths. You would have to decide with what type of artwork to reflect various types. You would have to decide whether to use existing Canal rules and Irrigation Ditch rules and expand them to be able to reflect polders or rather create new polder rules from scratch.
• How would you want to cover polder terrain in rules: Would you work with polder hexes (maybe requiring different types depending on the width/depth), or would you want to work with polder hexsides akin to wall/hedge/bocage?
• How would you treat Open Ground hexes which are enclosed by polder artwork? Is this OG with a special Bog modifier or would you want to address such terrain as polder even if it does not contain any drainage artwork?
• So far, we have "Embankment Rail Roads" in ASL but we don't have "Embankment Roads" I believe. The latter should be introduced when using polder terrain. Which should be easy to do, though. Embankment Roads would not only be realistic but also create a more intersting ASL terrain because they would affect LOS.

This should provide some food for thought.


von Marwitz

 

[PresterJohn]

And the polder could either be "maintained", or "not maintained" because the pumps and/or tidal gates have been damaged.

 

[von Marwitz]

And the polder could either be "maintained", or "not maintained" because the pumps and/or tidal gates have been damaged.

I do not know if such things historically happened in a possible ASL context.

But let me add, that it is common for Dutch polder areas to be several meters below sea level. Often 3 to 4 meters but up to more than 6 meters! In fact, roughly a quarter of the entire Netherlands lies below sea level, including several large cities. Due to land "sinking" because of drainage and on the other hand since sediment of rivers can only settle within the diked in areas bordering rivers, rivers in the Netherlands can flow 2 to 4 meters above the level of the surrounding countryside.

This means if dikes and drainange systems would not be maintained large swathes of the country would actually become entirely submerged. Kind of scary if you think about it.

I think the axle weight for agricultural machines in polder areas (i.e. after all vehicles specifically designed to work on soft ground) is limited by law to 10 (metric) tons. If the weather is wet, the turf of polder areas can be extremely vulnerable, so that even cattle are left in stables to avoid damage. This seems to indicate, that maeuvering through such terrain - let alone ditches / channels with heavy military equipment especially by soldiers not well acquainted to this type of terrain, would invite a bogging disaster.

von Marwitz

 

[PresterJohn]

Yes, but I wonder what the situation was like in 1944, and I'm thinking about during the Scheldt campaign.

 

[Chas]

Interestingly, after the German breakthrough in May 1940 the Dutch wanted to flood and defend the "polder areas" but the French did not want to and opted to defend more "traditionally".

 

[Houtje]

Dutch guy here, born and raised in the polder. The Oberst makes a lot of good points above (posts 24 and 26). One thing I'd add is that there is no one-size-fits-all. Traditional (or real) polders (areas 'stolen' from the sea by building dikes and pumping out the water using mills) are quite different from, e.g., low-lying areas where layers of peat were cut (so-called 'turfsteken'). The latter can be vast stretches of pretty soggy terrain (as the Oberst notes, heavy machinery and even cattle cannot enter them during wet periods, or at all in some cases) and often have no dikes at all. Of the former, so the traditional polders, a lot have clay soil which can be tough and dry and no problem for vehicles: they are worked on with heavy tractors, combine harvesters etc. These polders almost always have dikes: large ones on the seaside, lower ones inland; these should definitely be represented by Embankment roads or rather Embankment paths: some are paved nowadays, but most are not, and I think during WWII few were.

Episode 5 of Band of Brothers (Crossroads) shows pretty clearly how dominant these dikes were: controlling them meant making any approach through the polder extremely hazardous (i.e. a turkey shoot).

 

[Vinnie]

A large force churning up dried out wet ground has always been a problem.
One of the reasons he Scots won at Bannockburn was the larger English army had camped on ground that was, in June, dry and hard. But the large number of men and horses son churned it up into a sticky quagmire as it was an area that flooded every winter.

 

[lluis61]

A very interesting thread... My congratulations to all that contrbuted to, specially @von Marwitz and @Houtje
I'm not discussing about the polder terrain but, barring Operation Veritable and the Battle of the Scheldt, the other great operation (and well mapped) in flooded terrain was Utah Beach. The two maps attached show some features that would be present in that type of terrain: irrigation/drainage canals or ditches (the legend in the "Bigot" map doesn't make distinctions between them), elevated roads (In fact, in Utah Beach, the crux of airborne operatioms was to protect these in order the Germans couldn't reach them in force and so cut the Americans exit of the beaches) and other interesting landmarks, like the villages and houses in terrain not flood-able. While it not solves the problem of polder terrain, I think these maps give some pointers.

 

[FrankH.]

A very interesting thread... My congratulations to all that contrbuted to, specially @von Marwitz and @Houtje
I'm not discussing about the polder terrain but, barring Operation Veritable and the Battle of the Scheldt, the other great operation (and well mapped) in flooded terrain was Utah Beach. The two maps attached show some features that would be present in that type of terrain: irrigation/drainage canals or ditches (the legend in the "Bigot" map doesn't make distinctions between them), elevated roads (In fact, in Utah Beach, the crux of airborne operatioms was to protect these in order the Germans couldn't reach them in force and so cut the Americans exit of the beaches) and other interesting landmarks, like the villages and houses in terrain not flood-able.

It is kind of a pity that DZ SME does not cover this much. Well, in that it does not have somewhat free German setup / US airborne landing aspect to it. Maybe that could be changed / added later....

Also the SME map seems to have a lot more hedges than it has of flooded terrain.

 

[Vinnie]

SME is a significant distance(10km?) away from the coast so flooding would not have been as big an issue there.

 

[waltu]

An interesting topic. I was wondering if the Polder terrain applies to the area around the Peel Marshes, near Meijel, Holland.

My uncle was a tank driver in the US 7th Armored division during WW2. He was at the battle of Meijel, in Oct-Nov 1944, and I have often thought about designing some ASL scenarios based on this action. The Germans wanted to threaten the forces in Holland and attacked positions at the base of the penetration made during Market-Garden. The 9th Panzer and 11th Panzer-Grenadier attacked positions held by the US 7th AD and pushed them back some ways. Eventually the allies counter-attacked with the 15th Scottish Division and the 6th Guards Armoured Brigade. The Americans relied a lot on British artillery (which my uncle had a high regard for). According to him, there were British spotters embedded with the Americans. There is an interesting YouTube video (14 minutes) about the battle at:

The Forgotten German Counter-Offensive of WW2 | October 1944

There is also a collection of after-action reports in the following booklet:


There are a lot of dikes (dijks), canals, and low-lying terrain, not to mention the marsh areas. Not sure the best way to represent this in ASL terms.

 

[Hutch]

From what it looks like on Amazon, Mr. Johnston produced a series of books (20) on the 7th Armored Division.

https://www.amazon.com/stores/W-Wesley-Johnston/author/B00UKHBFN4?ref=sr_ntt_srch_lnk_1&qid=1746465788&sr=8-1&isDramIntegrated=true&shoppingPortalEnabled=true&ccs_id=14402883-91bb-450c-9851-29e434f47221

 

[waltu]

Yes, he did. He was sort of the de facto Historian for the 7th AD. He also created a very extensive web page for the 7 AD.
U. S. 7th Armored Division Association

U. S. 7th Armored Division Association

www.7tharmddiv.org

Long ago I exchanged a few emails with him about my uncle. Not sure if he is still around.

 

[Jacometti]

As the son of a dairy farmer raised in the Polder, I would add:

in our area (Polder "Zijpe", northwest of Alkmaar, very close behind the Atlantikwall (for which the nearby village of Petten was completely flattened)) the common size of a field for pasture would be around 100m by 50 m, with drainage/irrigation canals around it in rectangular fashion, just as seen in the pictures shared above. These canals would be 1-2 metres deep and 3-6 metres wide.

Much larger drainage canals (20-40 metres wide) run through the landscape connecting villages, have roads on both sides and stone bridges across - which would look a lot like the Pegasus Bridge canal area. These would be a few metres higher than the typical farmland.

I don't believe that agriculture/pasture land use was drastically diminished in most of Holland during WWII, or that a lot of damage was done to the (centuries-old) irrigation infrastructure as a result of the war. The exception would be areas where dikes were destroyed for the purpose of inundation - this was done at a limited scale by the Dutch army in May 1940 and on a larger scale by the Germans in 1944-5.

The areas of the Peel (Kampfgruppe Walther, SE of Holland near the German border), where there was very heavy fighting after the failure of Market Garden until early 1945, is an area famous for Swamps (due to centuries of Peat production) and would have been much worse in terms of terrain than the "average" Dutch polder.

The "irrigation ditches" introduced in Pegasus Bridge to not seem to have too much in common with the landscape I grew up in. There would be very little protection gained from the small irrigation ditches, and anyone with a slight height advantage would shoot you up like sitting ducks. To give that the same TEM as a patch of woods is rather ridiculous.

 

[Hutch]

Long ago I exchanged a few emails with him about my uncle. Not sure if he is still around.

He probably is, his Webpage was updated 24 February, 2025.

 

[waltu]

The areas of the Peel (Kampfgruppe Walther, SE of Holland near the German border), where there was very heavy fighting after the failure of Market Garden until early 1945, is an area famous for Swamps (due to centuries of Peat production) and would have been much worse in terms of terrain than the "average" Dutch polder.

By "much worse", do you mean low-lying? Or soft ground? Or simply marsh? Thanks for that.

 

[von Marwitz]

the common size of a field for pasture would be around 100m by 50 m, with drainage/irrigation canals around it in rectangular fashion, just as seen in the pictures shared above. These canals would be 1-2 metres deep and 3-6 metres wide.

Much larger drainage canals (20-40 metres wide) run through the landscape connecting villages, have roads on both sides and stone bridges across - which would look a lot like the Pegasus Bridge canal area. These would be a few metres higher than the typical farmland.

Good information. The drainage/irrigation small canals are deeper than I would have thought. Even if you pair (only) 1 meter depth with the soft ground at the bottom of these canals, trying to "ford" them with vehicles / tanks would invite disaster.

The "irrigation ditches" introduced in Pegasus Bridge to not seem to have too much in common with the landscape I grew up in. There would be very little protection gained from the small irrigation ditches, and anyone with a slight height advantage would shoot you up like sitting ducks. To give that the same TEM as a patch of woods is rather ridiculous.

We probably have to imagine the Pegasus Bridge irrgation ditches as roughly V-shaped ditches with some water at the bottom (or dry). This would allow one to take cover similarily than in a "small" ASL Gully, thus explaining the +1 TEM for these Pegasus Bridge ditches.

Since the polder "irrigation/drainage" ditches are typically full / more or less brimming, I agree it would not be warranted to have them provide +1 TEM. Given the typical depth and width of the smaller polder ditches (1-2m depth, 3-6m width), they would be a considerably greater challenge to cross than Pegasus Bridge irrigation ditches.

So, would you think a "small irrigation/drainage canal" in Dutch polder terrain could be better described ASL-wise for Infantry movement purposes as a Shallow or more likely Flooded Stream at Level 0 without Crest possibilities?

von Marwitz