Increasing pressure due to a packed schedule, insufficient compensation, poor facilities and, above all, cold feet, dissatisfaction grew among soldiers of the 44 Armored Infantry Battalion in Zuidlaren at the beginning of 1976. That discontent erupted exactly fifty years ago today with a major military strike.
This strike was also jokingly referred to in the national press as the cold feet protest. RTV Drenthe spoke with one of those involved, who wishes to remain anonymous. In the article we give him the fictitious name Remko.
Remko was one of the striking soldiers in Zuidlaren. And this refusal to serve eventually landed him in prison. Drent was sentenced to two weeks in prison and one week of probation. A sentence he served in Nieuwersluis prison, the former Defense prison.
“After my military service I ended up in the 44th in Zuidlaren,” Remko says about his time in the army. A busy, hectic period: “We had a lot of work to do, extra training for the UN brigade, preparing for deployment to Lebanon, we were ready for deployment during the train hijacking near Wijster in December ’75, we had to go to Rozendaal for two weeks. We were really under the weather.”
It was the time of the threat of nuclear weapons. “We were also trained for surveillance on that.” The last straw for the angry soldiers was an exercise in Germany that was scheduled during a severe frost period.
“We had to sleep in a sleeping bag in a small tent, they really didn’t think of us well. While the higher army leadership sat in a well-heated tent,” Remko says, still with an indignant tone in his voice.
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