Qualla: Ockenburg

Ockenburg: Introduction

Sun, 17 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Walkuraxx, CC BY-SA 3.0. The Junkers transports came in low over the dunes at first light on 10 May 1940. Their pilots had been told to land paratroopers on three Dutch airfields ringing The Hague, then take the city by surprise and capture the royal family. One of those fields was Ockenburg - a single short strip of grass and sand, six hundred meters by two hundred, surrounded by a ditch, ringed by villa estates and pine. Six months earlier it had been an auxiliary base of the Dutch Air Force, opened with quiet ceremony on 13 November 1939. By the morning of 13 May it was a smoking wreck. The whole battle for Ockenburg lasted three days.

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Image: Walkuraxx | CC BY-SA 3.0

Ockenburg: An Airshow Dream

Sun, 17 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit AnonymousUnknown author, Public domain. The story of Ockenburg starts the way a lot of European aviation history starts - with optimism. Already in May 1915 a private aircraft was moved here, apparently to teach pilots. By April 1919 The Hague's city council was discussing buying a parcel of dune-edge land in Westduine...

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Image: AnonymousUnknown author | Public domain

Ockenburg: Auxiliary Base

Sun, 17 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit AnonymousUnknown author, Public domain. The serious construction came late, in 1938, when the Netherlands was reading the news from across the German border and deciding it needed more places to disperse its small air force. Ockenburg became one of several auxiliary fields built that year. The 1939 opening was almost u...

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Image: AnonymousUnknown author | Public domain

Ockenburg: Three Days in May

Sun, 17 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit AnonymousUnknown author, Public domain. The Germans were looking specifically. The plan, hatched in Berlin, called for paratroopers and air-landed infantry to seize three airfields - Ockenburg, Ypenburg, and Valkenburg - then converge on The Hague and capture the Dutch government before it could organize. On 10 May 194...

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Image: AnonymousUnknown author | Public domain

Ockenburg: Park, Estate, Memory

Sun, 17 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Walkuraxx, CC BY-SA 3.0. After the war the runways were broken up and the land returned to the city. The name Ockenburg, much older than the airfield, had originally belonged to a seventeenth-century country estate built by the poet Jacob Westerbaen, friend of Constantijn Huygens, who farmed the dunes an...

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Image: Walkuraxx | CC BY-SA 3.0