A Personal Note

I have received a surprising number of emails from people around the globe who have thanked me for this Blog. Most of these responses have been from people who never had the chance to know their fathers who died in the War or from people, much like me, who took their father's World War II experiences for granted while growing up and raising their own families. Their fathers passed on before they had the chance to truly understand their experiences and lessons learned during the War.

As I responded to a very thoughtful email today, I explained how very lucky I am that my father is alive today at 87, and of course lucky to be here myself. Had a few things gone differently on May 17, 1943, I would not be here today. I am also getting to know my father so much better these days, visualizing as I write, his life at 22 years old.

I mentioned in an earlier post, in passing, that as my father was sitting with is back to the bulkhead, bracing for the crash, he was not afraid. I asked him today what was the basis of that sense of acceptance, was it a faith in God, a surrender to the inevitable or something else. He didn't have an easy answer. My father is a much too humble man to suggest that bravery was an explanation.

He finally said that he never believed there was any way to survive a B-26 crash. As will be described in later posts, many B-26 airplanes crashed during training in the United States and over seas and my father had never seen one person survive one of those crashes. My father, I believe, simply accepted his inevitable fate. This forces me to look deep into my own heart and wonder how I would have responded in these circumstances.

The certainty in his mind of his impending death, forced some form of acceptance and as he says "I was at peace." He told me, as many have said before, "My entire life in 30 seconds or so flashed before my eyes, from a young boy to the present." As I mentioned earlier, his only true regrets were the telegrams his parents would soon receive, the first, a "missing in action" message, and later "killed in action."

My father always stresses that the real heroes were those who never returned and as you can imagine he gets very emotional these days as he recalls all the friends and true heroes who died so young.

As I explained today in response to one of many emails, I have been sitting on my father's tapes, documents and pictures for much too long. I am so fortunate to have the opportunity to write this story with my father today.

It is ironic perhaps that this was my father's first time in Europe. A short distance to the north, The Hoel family had left Norway, and made the hard journey with my great-grandfather, Olaf Hoel, to Minnesota in the late 1800's. I will talk about that tomorrow and the many struggles my father's earlier generations experienced that perhaps contributed to my father's courage that day.

There are so many stories to follow that I get impatient to tell them all right now. I will give you a glimpse of one that occurred just following my father's interrogations by the Germans. Hearing that one of the prisoners, my father, was from Evanston, Illinois, a young German soldier who had not been involved in the interrogation asked his superiors if he might have a word with Second Lieutenant Hoel.

It turns out that my father and this now German soldier, both 22 years of age, had grown up in the same neighborhood in Evanston, Illinois. As the result of a cruel "invitation" to "Dual Citizens", young German men living in the United States, who still retained their German citizenship, were a few years earlier invited to take a free vacation to their homeland. Shortly after arrival they were "conscripted" into the German army and unable to return home.

The ironies of war.