One of the many interesting things about the Dutch is their fascination with canals. Now mind you, back in the day, pretty much everybody in Europe was into canal building, at least socially. You know how it is; you're at a party, someone starts passing around plans for excavator differentials- pretty soon there are all these scruffy guys tearing up the shrubberies and your populace doesn't cotton to it. Holland, however, developed a raging canal dependency that persists to this day. It's easy to understand why: canals were an easy way to move things, people, and water to exactly where they were needed. The canals and dikes were built at first to drain a lot of acreage, increasing agricultural output. As a side effect, the Dutch also got a tremendous strategic defensive advantage, since they could simply flood any territory occupied by enemy troops, and then sail in on canal boats to pick off the floaters. This crude but effective area denial weapons system made the heartlands of Holland pretty much immune to invasion.
Not only was the whole country fortified in this manner, most cities were as well, usually with a modern system of defenses behind a big deep canal. Check out Naarden, for example:
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And here's Zwolle, another cute one:
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And lastly, the incomparably adorable Heusden:
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Niiiice. You remember me blithering earlier about interlocking fields of fire? This is Vabaun a l'aqua. Not easy nuts to crack- and notice they put their churches right in the middle! Very orderly planners, the Dutch. Amsterdam was pretty much the same idea on a bigger, and coastal scale; check out the concentric canals, and thus, lines of defence:
Each of those little protrusions on the outer walls had its own windmill and battery of guns. Of the two, the windmills were probably the more formidable- these were big, military-grade mamas that were used to drain or drown the surrounding terrain. Check out the zoom-in:
This system of defenses worked like a charm until the mid-1900s. The canal defenses held against the panzers and stormtroopers- but they proved wholly ineffective in protecting Rotterdam against saturation bombing:
Faced with this display of firepower, 'Fortess Holland' capitulated, leaving Hitler free to finish off France at his leisure and giving Americans an object lesson on how to force surrender out of a stubborn populace. The Netherlands is a good place to bring your fat stoner friend (not me- I'm way too skinny). Stoner so they'll have fun at the coffeeshops, and fat so that when they fall into the canals while stoned they'll float more easily.
