The org chart said one regiment. The battlefield said four.

On paper, the defense of the Grebbeberg belonged to one unit: 8th Regiment Infantry, 2nd Battalion, 3rd Company — shorthand, 3–II–8 R.I. — part of II Army Corps. That's the unit this project's own primary sources come from — three firsthand accounts by men who were actually there, at different distances from the event: Rentjes and Elzas, both written from memory within a year of the battle; Vos, a full decade later, testimony given to the Military Decorations Commission. Different vantage points on the same fight.

Read against each other, those three accounts tell a story the official order of battle doesn't. As the German assault ground forward on 11–13 May 1940, the sector held by 3–II–8 R.I. didn't hold as one company's clean fight. Over those three days, soldiers from at least three other regiments — 24 R.I., 19 R.I., 11 R.I. — were fed into that same stretch of line piecemeal, out of their own units and their own chains of command, as the front began to give.

The paper organization and the actual battlefield order of battle diverge under pressure — troops from neighboring regiments got mixed into 8 R.I.’s sector as the line collapsed.

It's an unglamorous kind of detail — no single dramatic act, no named hero moment. But it's exactly the sort of thing that only survives in primary sources, because it doesn't fit the tidy narrative either side would prefer to tell afterward. The official history wants clean units with clean sectors. The battlefield, as these three men actually describe it, was reinforcements arriving from wherever they could be found, fighting next to strangers from other regiments, because the alternative was a hole in the line.

The human cost of holding that ground fell heaviest on 8 R.I. itself. The fighting of 11–13 May cost roughly 382 Dutch dead; that toll rises to 424 once the related action at Achterberg is counted. 8 R.I. alone lost 179 of those men — nearly half the battle's entire Dutch death toll, carried by the one unit that fought the outpost and front lines essentially without relief, exactly as its own survivors describe it happening.

German losses were lower — around 165 confirmed dead directly tied to the Grebbeberg fighting, though researchers place the real total "not much above 200" once ambiguous cases are folded in. I read the resulting 1.5-to-1 ratio against the Dutch side as coming from several things stacked together, not one: a real gap in artillery and air support between the two forces — German Stuka strikes hit Dutch positions hard on 12–13 May — the exposed terrain the defenders held, and, the thing this article is actually about, a defense being patched together from strangers rather than fought by a single rehearsed unit. None of that is a verdict on which side's infantry fought harder. It's an argument against reducing a messy battle to one clean cause.

None of this changes who won or lost at the Grebbeberg. What it changes is how confidently anyone should describe the battle as a clean contest between two well-organized forces. The organizational chart is real. So is what actually happened once the fighting started and the chart stopped describing it.