A Matter of Time

Growing up in the 1950’s, my brother Gil, sister Kim and I were all aware of my father’s experiences as a bombardier/navigator in a B-26 Marauder during World War II, the crash of his plane in the Maas River near Amsterdam and his subsequent life as a prisoner of war in Stalug Luft III, the camp which was the genesis of “The Great Escape.” However, my father never talked much about his experiences. As children, the War seemed like ancient history and a closed book. And I believe that my father and many other veterans were not particularly interested in opening that book. America had been victorious, the country seemed more unified than at any other time I have seen since and families were excited about capturing the American Dream which seemed to be available like never before.

On August 27, 2003, my father and our family were in different ways invited and compelled to return to my father’s war memories and it has changed each of us in different ways. I’ll let the events of that day speak for themselves through the story that appeared and was picked up by news outlets throughout the world:

Watch Survives WW II, Follows Him Home

ASSOCIATED PRESS, EVANSTON, Ill. - Jim Hoel is glad to have his watch back, even though it had stopped working since he last saw it during World War II. The last time he remembers wearing the old Gallet chronometer was on May 17, 1943, the day he used it while navigating a B-26 Marauder before the bomber was forced to ditch in a canal in the Netherlands. He knows he no longer had the elaborate watch when he arrived at a German prisoner-of-war camp a few days later.

The watch arrived at his home last week in a package sent from England by a truck driver, Peter Cooper, 56, who found it in the possession of an elderly neighbor in the village of Kirton, 75 miles northeast of London.

"It’s just eerie, isn't it? That was 60 years ago. I've sort of got gooseflesh," Hoel, 82, told the Chicago Tribune.

Cooper said the neighbor, "Tiny" Baxter, 89, told him his mother had given it to him."Whether she found it or it was given to her, I do not know," Baxter, a retired carpenter, said in a telephone interview.

The watch, an enlistment present from the bank where Hoel worked before the war, had his name and Evanston address on the back. Cooper was able to track him down at his new address using the Internet and friends who had contacts in the United States. He persuaded his neighbor to give the watch to him so he could forward it to Hoel.

Hoel said the B-26 was one of a flight of 10 that encountered heavy antiaircraft fire while en route to bomb a power plant near Amsterdam. He and three others of the plane's six crewmen survived. He spent the next two years in German POW camps.

At the time my father's plane went down, his bomber group was part of the “Mighty 8th Air Force” and my family and I have been gathering information about my father’s experiences ever since. I’ve written several stories about specific aspects of my father’s experiences and I am trying to design a book, but I have continually, and willingly, been distracted by the individual and fascinating “little” stories of courage, struggle and survival that have captured my heart as I gather material not only about the watch “reunion”, but my father's life in the Stalug Luft III POW camp, the brutal “Death March” of POW’s in January 1945, his eventual liberation and his trip back to the site of his crash several years ago with my brother Gil where he was welcomed by the entire town as a hero.

My father also had the opportunity to visit the graves of those in his crew who did not survive. Pictures of my father, during his recent trip “back”, standing on the spot where he swam to the shore of the Nieuwe Waterweg River between Rozenburg and Maassluisin, Holland after his plane went down, are personally very powerful to me.

I frankly don’t yet know how this blog will evolve. My hope is to tell my father’s entire fascinating story of war and also to add stories and memories from my family and from those who shared my father’s experiences both during the War and since his reunion with his watch, many in Europe who helped organize my father’s trip back to the Nieuwe Waterweg River and honored him while he was there.

On a technical note, the story will be told in part in my father’s own words. When I tell his story, I’ll refer to my father as Jim Hoel.